Experimental comparison of navigation in a Galois lattice with conventional information retrieval methods

This experiment suggests that retrieval using a Galois lattice structure may be an attractive alternative since it combines a good performance for subject searching along with browsing potential.

Abstract

A controlled experiment was conducted comparing information retrieval using a Galois lattice structure with two more conventional retrieval methods: navigating in a manually built hierarchical classification and Boolean querying with index terms. No significant performance difference was found between Boolean querying and the Galois lattice retrieval method for subject searching with the three measures used for the experiment: user searching time, recall and precision. However, hierarchical classification retrieval did show significantly lower recall compared to the other two methods. This experiment suggests that retrieval using a Galois lattice structure may be an attractive alternative since it combines a good performance for subject searching along with browsing potential.