History
The concern with the problem of finding relevant information dates back at least to the first publication of scientific journals in 17th Century.
The formal study of relevance began in the 20th Century with the study of what would later be called bibliometrics. In the 1930s and 1940s, S. C. Bradford used the term "relevant" to characterize articles relevant to a subject (cf., Bradford's law). In the 1950s, the first information retrieval systems emerged, and researchers noted the retrieval of irrelevant articles as a significant concern. In 1958, B. C. Vickery made the concept of relevance explicit in an address at the International Conference on Scientific Information.
Since 1958, information scientists have explored and debated definitions of relevance. A particular focus of the debate was the distinction between "relevance to a subject" or "topical relevance" and "user relevance".
Recently, Zhao and Callan (2010) showed a connection between the relevance probability and the vocabulary mismatch problem in retrieval, which could lead to at least 50-300% gains in retrieval accuracy.
Read more about this topic: Relevance (information Retrieval)
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