relevance
from
The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48
Relevance \Rel"e*vance\ (r?l"?*vans), Relevancy \Rel"e*van*cy\
(-van*s?), n.
1. The quality or state of being relevant; pertinency;
applicability.
[1913 Webster]
Its answer little meaning, little relevancy bore.
--Poe.
[1913 Webster]
2. (Scots Law) Sufficiency to infer the conclusion.
[1913 Webster]
from
The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (8 July 2008)
relevance
<information science> A measure of how closely a given object
(file, {web page}, database {record}, etc.) matches a user's
search for information.
The relevance {algorithms} used in most large web {search
engines} today are based on fairly simple word-occurence
measurement: if the word "daffodil" occurs on a given page,
then that page is considered relevant to a {query} on the word
"daffodil"; and its relevance is quantised as a factor of the
number of times the word occurs in the page, on whether
"daffodil" occurs in title of the page or in its META
keywords, in the first {N} words of the page, in a heading,
and so on; and similarly for words that a {stemmer} says are
based on "daffodil".
More elaborate (and resource-expensive) relevance algorithms
may involve thesaurus (or {synonym ring}) lookup; e.g. it
might rank a document about narcissuses (but which may not
mention the word "daffodil" anywhere) as relevant to a query
on "daffodil", since narcissuses and daffodils are basically
the same thing. Ditto for queries on "jail" and "gaol", etc.
More elaborate forms of thesaurus lookup may involve
multilingual thesauri (e.g. knowing that documents in Japanese
which mention the Japanese word for "narcissus" are relevant
to your search on "narcissus"), or may involve thesauri (often
auto-generated) based not on equivalence of meaning, but on
word-proximity, such that "bulb" or "bloom" may be in the
thesaurus entry for "daffodil".
{Word spamming} essentially attempts to falsely increase a web
page's relevance to certain common searches.
See also {subject index}.
(1997-04-09)
from
Moby Thesaurus II by Grady Ward, 1.0
85 Moby Thesaurus words for "relevance":
account, admissibility, advantage, affective meaning, affinity,
applicability, application, appositeness, appropriateness,
aptitude, aptness, bearing, coloring, concern, concernment,
connection, connotation, consequence, denotation, drift, effect,
essence, extension, felicity, fitness, fittedness, force,
germaneness, gist, grammatical meaning, idea, impact, implication,
import, intension, interest, lexical meaning, literal meaning,
materiality, meaning, overtone, pertinence, pith, point,
practical consequence, propriety, purport, qualification,
range of meaning, real meaning, reference, referent, regard,
relatedness, relation, respect, scope, semantic cluster,
semantic field, sense, service, serviceability, significance,
signification, significatum, signifie, span of meaning, spirit,
structural meaning, substance, suitability, suitableness, sum,
sum and substance, symbolic meaning, tenor, tie-in,
totality of associations, transferred meaning, unadorned meaning,
undertone, use, usefulness, utility, value
[email protected]