Characterizing relevance on mobile and desktop

Abstract

Relevance judgments are central to Information retrieval evaluation. With increasing number of hand held devices at users disposal today, and continuous improvement in web standards and browsers, it has become essential to evaluate whether such devices and dynamic page layouts affect users notion of relevance. Given dynamic web pages and content rendering, we know little about what kind of pages are relevant on devices other than desktop. With this work, we take the first step in characterizing relevance on mobiles and desktop. We collect crowd sourced judgments on mobile and desktop to systematically determine whether screen size of a device and page layouts impact judgments. Our study shows that there are certain difference between mobile and desktop judgments. We also observe different judging times, despite similar interrater agreement on both devices. Finally, we also propose and evaluate display and viewport specific features to predict relevance. Our results indicate that viewport based features can be used to reliably predict mobile relevance.