RT list: new tests of relevance theory in information science

An article entitled "Some new tests of relevance theory in information
science" by Howard D. White (from Drexel University Philadelphia) published
online 31 December 2009 in *Scientrometrics* (DOI 10.1007/s11192-009-0138-3)
available here: http://www.springerlink.com/content/l68753u594406178/

*Abstract* A central idea in Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson’s relevance
theory is that an individual’s sense of the relevance of an input varies
directly with the cognitive effects, and inversely with the processing
effort, of the input in a context. I argue that this idea has an objective
analog in information science—the tf*idf (term frequency, inverse document
frequency) formula used to weight indexing terms in document retrieval.
Here, tf*idf is used to weight terms from five bibliometric distributions in
the context of the seed terms that generated them. The distributions include
the descriptors co-assigned with a descriptor, the descriptors and
identifiers assigned to an author, two examples of cited authors and their
co-citees, and the books and journals cited with a famous book, *The
Structure of Scientific Revolutions*. In each case, the highest-ranked terms
are contrasted with lowest-ranked terms. In two cases, pennant diagrams, a
new way of displaying bibliometric data, augment the tabular results. Clear
qualitative differences between the sets of terms are intuitively
well-explained by relevance theory.
Received on Sat Jan 2 09:16:38 2010