Relevance Judgments and Measurements
2017
Users intuitively know which documents are relevant when they see them. Formal relevance assessment, however, is a complex issue. In this entry relevance assessment are described both from a human perspective and a systems perspective. Humans judge relevance in terms of the relation between the documents retrieved and the way in which these documents are understood and used. This is a subjective and personal judgment and is called user relevance. Systems compute a function between the query and the document features that the systems builders believe will cause documents to be ranked by the likelihood that a user will find the documents relevant. This is an objective measurement of relevance in terms of relations between the query and the documents retrieved�this is called system relevance (or sometimes similarity)