[Sigia-l] Concepts and Categories [longish] was mixing apples and oranges and tomatoes

[Tanya Rabourn]

Ward_Conant at URSCorp.com wrote:
> I thought the below-referenced paper spoke more to category labels than
> it did to category content (redundant or not). I.e., user "confusion"
> seemed more a product of overly general labels of top-level categories
> than a product of finding some things repeated within more than one
> category ... FWIW.


That's not what they concluded. It discusses redundancy on the next to
last page (pg.4).

"Follow up analyses showed a strong correlation between the proportion of
redundant sub categories and the frequency with which a top-level category
was confused with other categories (r (9) = .76, p < .05).  This finding
suggests that a high level of redundancy makes it very difficult for users
to learn to differentiate one category from another."

Still though, it is just one study. I don't know of any others that
address it. It would be good to see one done that involved more specific
content and top level category labels.

-Tanya
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Tanya Rabourn <rabourn at columbia.edu>
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