A method to retrieve information having heterogeneousness as well as relevance for supporting human divergent thinking
In this paper, we discuss an effective method to retrieve pieces of
information that are heterogeneous as well as relevant to a certain
piece of information. The main purpose of retrieving such information
is to support human divergent thinking. Brainstorming is a well-known
method for supporting human divergent thinking and experience tells us
that it is effective that an outsider attends a brainstorming session
being held by only experts of the same domain. The goal of our
research is to construct a virtual outsider system. The method of
information retrieval discussed in this paper is one of the important
elements to realize the system. We proposed "An outsider model" to
retrieve such information and constructed a prototype system based on
the model. Moreover, we discussed what kind of information effectively
stimulates human divergent thinking and proposed an subjective
evaluation method whether a piece of information is effective for
supporting human divergent thinking or not. Using the prototype
system, we conducted subjective experiments and evaluated results
based on the evaluation method. By these experiments, we got the
following results: Using the outsider model, (1) medium relevant as
well as medium heterogeneous information can effectively be gotten,
(2) Furthermore, there is possibility to obtain highly relevant as
well as highly heterogeneous information, too. Such information is
expected to effectively stimulate human divergent thinking and is hard
to be gotten without any mechanism like the outsider model to obtain
hidden relevance along with relevance.