All information exchange on the Internet – whether through full text, controlled vocabularies, ontologies, or other mechanisms – ultimately requires that that an information provider and seeker use the same word or symbol. In this paper, we investigate what happens when both searchers and authors are dynamically choosing terms to match the other side. With each side trying to anticipate the other, does a terminological convention ever emerge, or do searchers and providers continue to miss potential partners through mis-match of terms? We use a game-theoretic setup to frame questions, and learning theory to make predictions about whether and which term will emerge as a convention.
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