Measuring Generality of Documents

Most traditional Information Retrieval (IR) systems, including web search engines, operationalize “relevant” as the word frequency in a document of a set of keywords. Because of this limitation, traditional IR systems frequently retrieve irrelevant documents in response to a user’s request. In this paper, we propose a new criterion, “generality,” that provides an additional basis on which to rank retrieved documents. The generality is a level of ion to retrieve results based on desired generality appropriate for a user’s knowledge and interests. We compared our generality quantification algorithm with human judges’ weighting of values to show that the developed algorithm is significantly correlated.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: ICDE
• Authors: Hyun Woong Shin, Eduard H. Hovy, Dennis McLeod, Larry Pryor
• Keywords: Database, Generality Appropriate, Generality Quantification Algorithm, ICDE 2006, Traditional Ir Systems