UNIFICATION OF THEORY AND EMPIRICISM IN INFORMATION RETRIEVAL

Abstract

The report outlines and comments upon: (1) Notification Theory and 'Information Flow'. Notification activities are those that notify or deliver recorded messages to readers at the reader's request. It is shown that they involve twenty elementary activities. These correspond to the triads of the six variables - Source, Destination, Designation, Message, Channel, Code. 'Flow' between two of these variables exists only when they belong to a tetrad formed from two triads with another two variables in common. Thus, six distinct flows can exist. (2) Measures of Retrieval Efficiency. 'Precision Ratio' and 'Recall Ratio' are meaningless, because they can be altered at will by altering the document collection along. Also, they imply a bizarre 'probabilistic' model of retrieval, and of readers' requirements. Before even the existence of numerical measures of retrieval efficiency can be accepted, certain problems must be solved. (3) Conferences, Committees. The author comments on conferences and committees, USA and UK, which he attended 1966-67.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Oct 05, 1967
Accession Number
AD0661973

Entities

People

  • Robert A. Fairthorne

Tags

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Acquisition
  • Air Force
  • Confidence Limits
  • Contracts
  • Efficiency
  • Information Processing
  • Information Retrieval
  • Information Science
  • Information Systems
  • Information Theory
  • New York
  • Patent Office
  • Precision
  • Probabilistic Models
  • Scientific Research
  • Standards
  • Universities

Readers

  • Educational Psychology
  • Regression Analysis.
  • Theoretical Analysis.

Technology Areas

  • AI & ML
  • AI & ML - Information Retrieval
  • AI & ML - Machine Learning Algorithms
  • AI & ML - Machine Translation