EXPERIMENTS IN RELEVANCE WEIGHTING OF SEARCH TERMS

Following successful initial tests of theoretically-based schemes for relevance weighting of search terms, further experiments were undertaken to validate these results. The experiments were designed to investigate weighting for a large document set, poor matching conditions, heterogeneous data, and limited relevance information, i.e. the use of weighting in more realistic conditions than the initial ones. The results confirm the earlier ones: very striking improvements in retrieval performance were obtained, especially for the theoretically best-founded weighting formula. The experiments illustrate a much more promising application of statistical methods to indexing and searching than any studied hitherto. © 1979.