Some New Tests of Relevance Theory in Information Science

A central idea in D. Sperber & D. Wilson's relevance theory is that an individual's sense of the relevance of an input in a context varies directly with its cognitive effects and inversely with its ease of processing in that context. H. D. White has argued that this idea has an objective analogue in information science-the tf*idf (term frequency, inverse document frequency) formula used to weight indexing terms in document retrieval. Here, tf*idf is used to weight terms from five bibliometric distributions in the context of the seed terms that generated them. The distributions include the descriptors co-assigned with a descriptor, the descriptors and identifiers assigned to an author, two examples of cited authors and their co-citees, and the books and journals cited with a famous book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. In each case, the highest-ranked terms are contrasted with lowest-ranked terms. Clear qualitative differences between the sets of terms are intuitively well-explained by relevance theory.