A Geometric View of Relevance Effectiveness in Information Retrieval
Sándor Dominich · 2000
. Relevance is a central concept in Information Retrieval (IR). It is used to work out effectiveness measures for IR systems, i.e. measures to express how well (or bad) an IR system performs; classical measures are precision, recall, fallout. It is shown that the empirical relation P=NR/x (P=precision, R=recall, N=total number of relevant documents, x=the number of retrieved documents) can be formally easily obtained. It is also shown that using the concept of fallout a typical surface can be constructed with the noteworthy properties that it looks similarly for every IR system and each point on this surface corresponds to a 3-tuple (precision, recall, fallout) and thus to one retrieval process. Thus, the name of effectiveness surface is suggested for it. The performance of an IR system can be enhanced by a technique called relevance feedback (used to return documents that are likely to be more relevant). A sequence of repeatedly applied relevance feedbacks, being a sequence of repeate...