A TEST FOR THE SEPARATION OF RELEVANT AND NON‐RELEVANT DOCUMENTS IN EXPERIMENTAL RETRIEVAL COLLECTIONS
C. J. van Rijsbergen, Karen Spärck Jones · Journal of Documentation · 1973
Many retrieval experiments are intended to discover ways of improving performance, taking the results obtained with some particular technique as a baseline. The fact that substantial alterations to a system often have little or no effect on particular collections is puzzling. This may be due to the initially poor separation of relevant and non‐relevant documents. The paper presents a procedure for characterizing this separation for a collection, which can be used to show whether proposed modifications of the base system are likely to be useful.