Ranking documents with a thesaurus

Roy Rada and Ellen Bicknell

Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 1989, vol. 40, issue 5, 304-310

Abstract: This article reports on exploratory experiments in evaluating and improving a thesaurus through studying its effect on retrieval. A formula called DISTANCE was developed to measure the conceptual distance between queries and documents encoded as sets of thesaurus terms. DISTANCE references MeSH (Medical Subject Headings) and assesses the degree of match between a MeSH‐encoded query and document. The performance of DISTANCE on MeSH is compared to the performance of people in the assessment of conceptual distance between queries and documents, and is found to simulate with surprising accuracy the human performance. The power of the computer simulation stems both from the tendency of people to rely heavily on broader‐than (BT) relations in making decisions about conceptual distance and from the thousands of accurate BT relations in MeSH. One source for discrepancy between the algorithms' measurement of closeness between query and document and people's measurement of closeness between query and document is occasional inconsistency in the BT relations. Our experiments with adding non‐BT relations to MeSH showed how these non‐BT relations could improve document ranking, if DISTANCE were also appropriately revised to treat these relations differently from BT relations. © 1989 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Date: 1989
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1002/(SICI)1097-4571(198909)40:53.0.CO;2-6

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:jamest:v:40:y:1989:i:5:p:304-310

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://doi.org/10.1002/(ISSN)1097-4571

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of the American Society for Information Science from Association for Information Science & Technology
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().