Modeling Triage Decision Making

J. Isaiah Harbison, Alan Mishler, Thomas S. Wallsten

Abstract: With the ever increasing amount of information available, the ability to prioritize the most relevant items for full processing is increasingly necessary to maintain expertise in a domain. As a result, accurate triage decisions--initial decisions about the relevance of a given article, book, or talk in order to determine whether to pursue that information further--are very important. In the present paper, we present a model of triage decision making that includes both an information search component to determine reading strategy and a decision making component to make the final decision. We apply the model to human relevance ratings as well as binary decisions of relevance for a set of emails.