Measuring the incremental information value of documents

The incremental searcher satisfaction model for Information Retrieval has been introduced to capture the incremental information value of documents. In this paper, from various cognitive perspectives, searcher requirements are derived in terms of the increment function. Different approaches for the construction of increment functions are identified, such as the individual and the collective approach. Translating the requirements to similarity functions leads to the so-called base similarity features and the monotonicity similarity features. We show that most concrete similarity functions in IR, such as Inclusion, Jaccard’s, Dice’s, and Cosine coefficient, and some other approaches to similarity functions, possess the base similarity features. The Inclusion coefficient also satisfies the monotonicity features.