Can you relate? A study of user perceptions of thesaural subject relationships

This poster describes a pilot study investigating what, if any, associative thesaural relationships are identifiable and distinguishable to information seekers. Using associative relationships from the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH), we asked potential library users via Amazon Mechanical Turk to identify six narrower distinctions of established associative relationship types. Preliminary results from the survey indicate that some associative relationship types, such as near synonym and agent/process, are indeed identifiable, while others, like position in time and space, remain problematic.