Investigating Bell Inequalities for Multidimensional Relevance Judgments in Information Retrieval

Relevance judgment in Information Retrieval is influenced by multiple factors. These include not only the topicality of the documents but also other user oriented factors like trust, user interest, etc. Recent works have identified and classified these various factors into seven dimensions of relevance. In a previous work, these relevance dimensions were quantified and user’s cognitive state with respect to a document was represented as a state vector in a Hilbert Space, with each relevance dimension representing a basis. It was observed that relevance dimensions are incompatible in some documents, when making a judgment. Incompatibility being a fundamental feature of Quantum Theory, this motivated us to test the Quantum nature of relevance judgments using Bell type inequalities. However, none of the Bell-type inequalities tested have shown any violation. We discuss our methodology to construct incompatible basis for documents from real world query log data, the experiments to test Bell inequalities on this dataset and possible reasons for the lack of violation.