The experimental evidence accumulated over the past 20 years indicates that textindexing systems based on the assignment of appropriately weighted single terms produce retrieval results that are superior to those obtainable with other more elaborate text representations. These results depend crucially on the choice of effective term weighting systems. This paper summarizes the insights gained in automatic term weighting, and provides baseline single term indexing models with which other more elaborate content analysis procedures can be compared.

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Term Weighting Approaches in Automatic Text Retrieval

Information science emerged as the third subject, along with logic and philosophy, to deal with relevance-an elusive, human notion. The concern with relevance, as a key notion in information science, is traced to the problems of scientific communication. Relevance is considered as a measure of the effectiveness of a contact between a source and a destination in a communication process. The different views of relevance that emerged are interpreted and related within a framework of communication of knowledge. Different views arose because relevance was considered at a number of different points in the process of knowledge communication. It is suggested that there exists an interlocking, interplaying cycle of various systems of relevances.

Relevance: a review of and a framework for the thinking on the notion in information science

Relevant: Having significant and demonstrable bearing on the matter at hand.

A version of this article has been published in 2006 as a chapter in E.G. Abels & D.A. Nitecki (Eds.), Advances in Librarianship (Vol. 30, pp. 3–71). San Diego: Academic Press. (Saracevic, 2006).

Relevance: The ability as of an information retrieval system to retrieve material that satisfies the needs of the user.

—Merriam-Webster Dictionary 2005

Relevance is a, if not even the, key notion in information science in general and information retrieval in particular. This two-part critical review traces and synthesizes the scholarship on relevance over the past 30 years and provides an updated framework within which the still widely dissonant ideas and works about relevance might be interpreted and related. It is a continuation and update of a similar review that appeared in 1975 under the same title, considered here as being Part I. The present review is organized into two parts: Part II addresses the questions related to nature and manifestations of relevance, and Part III addresses questions related to relevance behavior and effects. In Part II, the nature of relevance is discussed in terms of meaning ascribed to relevance, theories used or proposed, and models that have been developed. The manifestations of relevance are classified as to several kinds of relevance that form an interdependent system of relevances. In Part III, relevance behavior and effects are synthesized using experimental and observational works that incorporate data. In both parts, each section concludes with a summary that in effect provides an interpretation and synthesis of contemporary thinking on the topic treated or suggests hypotheses for future research. Analyses of some of the major trends that shape relevance work are offered in conclusions. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

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Relevance: A review of the literature and a framework for thinking on the notion in information science. Part II: nature and manifestations of relevance

Use of test collections and evaluation measures to assess the effectiveness of information retrieval systems has its origins in work dating back to the early 1950s. Across the nearly 60 years since that work started, use of test collections is a de facto standard of evaluation. This monograph surveys the research conducted and explains the methods and measures devised for evaluation of retrieval systems, including a detailed look at the use of statistical significance testing in retrieval experimentation. This monograph reviews more recent examinations of the validity of the test collection approach and evaluation measures as well as outlining trends in current research exploiting query logs and live labs. At its core, the modern-day test collection is little different from the structures that the pioneering researchers in the 1950s and 1960s conceived of. This tutorial and review shows that despite its age, this long-standing evaluation method is still a highly valued tool for retrieval research.

/pdf/test-collection-based-evaluation-of-information-retrieval-6yfk2vuddi.pdf

Test Collection Based Evaluation of Information Retrieval Systems

In Information Extraction (IE), processing of named entities in text has traditionally been seen as a two-step process comprising a flat text span recognition sub-task and an atomic classification sub-task; relating the text span to a model of the world has been ignored by evaluations such as DARPA/NIST's MUC or ACE However, spatial and temporal expressions refer to events in space-time, and the grounding of events is a precondition for accurate reasoning Thus, automatic grounding can improve many applications such as automatic map drawing (eg for choosing a focus) and question answering (eg, for questions like How far is London from Edinburgh, given a story in which both occur and can be resolved) Whereas temporal grounding has received considerable attention in the recent Past [2, 3], robust spatial grounding has long been neglected Concentrating on geographic names for populated places, I define the task of automatic Toponym Resolution (TR) as computing the mapping from occurrences of names for places as found in a text to a representation of the extensional semantics of the location referred to (its referent), such as a geographic latitude/longitude footprint The task of mapping from names to locations is hard due to insufficient and noisy databases, and a large degree of ambiguity: common words need to be distinguished from proper names (geo/non-geo ambiguity), and the mapping between names and locations is ambiguous London can refer to the capital of the UK or to London, Ontario, Canada, or to about forty other Londons on earth) In addition, names of places and the boundaries referred to change over time, and databases are incomplete

James W. Perry

Papers

Machine literature searching VIII. Operational criteria for designing information retrieval systems

Machine literature searching X. Machine language; factors underlying its design and development

Machine literature searching

Punched Cards: Their Applications to Science and Industry.

Tools for machine literature searching : semantic code dictionary, equipment, procedures