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On the role of trust in collaborative Web search

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Abstract

Recommender systems combine ideas from information retrieval, user modelling, and artificial intelligence to focus on the provision of more intelligent and proactive information services. As such, recommender systems play an important role when it comes to assisting the user during both routine and specialised information retrieval tasks. Like any good assistant it is important that users can trust in the ability of a recommender system to respond with timely and relevant suggestions. In this paper, we will look at a collaborative recommendation system operating in the domain of Web search. We will show how explicit models of trust can help to inform more reliable recommendations that translate into more relevant search results. Moreover, we demonstrate how the availability of this trust-model facilitates important interface enhancements that provide a means to declare the provenance of result recommendations in a way that will allow searchers to evaluate their likely relevance based on the reputation and trustworthiness of the recommendation partners behind these suggestions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer Science and Informatics, University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland

    Peter Briggs & Barry Smyth

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  1. Peter Briggs
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  2. Barry Smyth
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Correspondence to Peter Briggs.

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Briggs, P., Smyth, B. On the role of trust in collaborative Web search. Artif Intell Rev 25, 97–117 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10462-007-9025-6

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