Quantum contextuality in classical information retrieval
This work addresses the challenge of modeling personalization in information retrieval for users, but it is incremental as it applies existing quantum concepts to a new domain without introducing a novel method.
The paper tackles the problem of non-classical correlations in document ranking by drawing a structural analogy between quantum contextuality and personalization in information retrieval, proposing to treat knowledge revision as a measurement and suggesting a way to quantify personalization rates.
Document ranking based on probabilistic evaluations of relevance is known to exhibit non-classical correlations, which may be explained by admitting a complex structure of the event space, namely, by assuming the events to emerge from multiple sample spaces. The structure of event space formed by overlapping sample spaces is known in quantum mechanics, they may exhibit some counter-intuitive features, called quantum contextuality. In this Note I observe that from the structural point of view quantum contextuality looks similar to personalization of information retrieval scenarios. Along these lines, Knowledge Revision is treated as operationalistic measurement and a way to quantify the rate of personalization of Information Retrieval scenarios is suggested.