Towards ranking cultural terms from originating source

Abstract

The use of Search Engine enables the information seeker to seek information from a wide range of categories. Cultural information is one of the unique categories among the classes of information searched by users. This is because, there exists a significant relationship between a cultural keyword and its' originating society. Naturally, societies are supposed to be the highest authoritative body over their own cultural keywords. However, current ranking schemes treat all queries as the same without considering the uniqueness of cultural keywords, and this easily misleads information seekers. Therefore, to evaluate search engines performance on cultural keywords, we conducted a survey using some Ghanaian's terms as our case study on the basis of trust, relevance and accessibility. Surprisingly, the results showed that several documents from external sources (regions outside the location of that culture) had higher rankings against that of the originating source. Further investigations using precision and discounted cumulative gain proved that the cultural term problem is more of ranking than retrieval. Upon our findings, we propose a ranking framework based on the keyword-source namely TermSource. It is centered on cultural information advocacy, cultural websites management, and usage adaptation. By the adoption of this framework, the web will be enriched not only with cultural information but also be improved in ranking efficiency.