Abstract
The studies form part of a programme in which a computer will be used to generate an “index vocabulary” appropriate for the indexing and retrieval of documents in various scientific disciplines; the computer will then index a suitable collection of documents and retrieve documents in response to specific enquiries.
The present paper describes how such a system works for a particularly simple text. Then, ten evaluation methods are put forward, and used to assess individual descriptors, indexing rules, and the system as a whole. In this exercise the evaluation methods themselves are on trial and four are selected as being more generally useful than the others.
For evaluating whole retrieval systems a type of random enquiry is used for which the perfect answer is computable; relevance and recall ratios can then be objectively determined.
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