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.