Indexing and retrieval performance: The logical evidence

Dagobert Soergel

Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 1994, vol. 45, issue 8, 589-599

Abstract: This article presents a logical analysis of the characteristics of indexing and their effects on retrieval performance. It establishes the ability to ask the questions one needs to ask as the foundation of performance evaluation, and recall and discrimination as the basic quantitative performance measures for binary noninteractive retrieval systems. It then defines the characteristics of indexing that affect retrieval—namely, indexing devices, viewpoint‐based and importance‐based indexing exhaustivity, indexing specificity, indexing correctness, and indexing consistency—and examines in detail their effects on retrieval. It concludes that retrieval performance depends chiefly on the match between indexing and the requirements of the individual query and on the adaptation of the query formulation to the characteristics of the retrieval system, and that the ensuing complexity must be considered in the design and testing of retrieval systems. © 1994 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Date: 1994
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1002/(SICI)1097-4571(199409)45:83.0.CO;2-E

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:45:y:1994:i:8:p:589-599

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 ().