Beyond topicality: A two stage view of relevance and the retrieval process

• Published in: Information processing & management Vol. 18; no. 3; pp. 105 - 109
• Main Author: Boyce, Bert
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Oxford Elsevier Ltd 1982; Pergamon Press; Elsevier Science Ltd
• Subjects: Information retrieval; Information storage and retrieval; Information work; Relevance; Searches; Searching; Stages; Subject indexing; Systems; Technical services; Topicality
• ISSN: 0306-4573; 1873-5371
• DOI: 10.1016/0306-4573(82)90033-4

Topicality is an operationally necessary but insufficient condition for requestor judged relevance. Documents are independent of one another as to any judgement of their topicality but not independent as to any judgement of their relevance which is a function of their informativeness to a requestor. Recall depends solely upon topicality but precision depends upon informativeness as well. A retrieval system which aspires to the retrieval of relevant documents should have a second stage which will order the topical set in a manner so as to provide maximum informativeness to the requestor. Should a system be concerned only with topicality then a two stage system which generates a high recall set and discards imprecise documents by measuring their distance from a seed document can be iterated to provide topicality feedback without user input.