Relevance of science information: Origins and dimensions of relevance and their implications to information retrieval

摘要

Relevance is the key abstract concept in information retrieval. For effective information retrieval the system needs to retrieve documents based on the user's notion of relevance. To find dimensions and characteristics of relevance, 24 graduate students' relevance judgments were observed. The findings are (1) that relevance is multidimensional; (2) that there are two types of relevance dimension, primary and secondary; (3) that relevance dimensions show three orientations, problem, use, and value; and (4) that the problem orientation is primary to the other orientations. The implications of these findings are (1) that four characteristics of important relevance dimensions were found; (2) that the important dimensions need to be applied to the system's measurement of relevance; (3) that relationships between thesaurus terms need to be set following the important dimensions; (4) that the important dimensions are useful for the effective evaluation of information retrieval; and (5) that these and the orientations of relevance are useful to observe users' relevance judgments for the study of variables affecting relevance judgments.