3  definitions  found 
 
  From  Webster's  Revised  Unabridged  Dictionary  (1913)  [web1913]: 
 
  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. 
 
  Its  answer  little  meaning,  little  relevancy  bore. 
  --Poe. 
 
  2.  (Scots  Law)  Sufficiency  to  infer  the  conclusion. 
 
  From  WordNet  r  1.6  [wn]: 
 
  relevance 
  n  :  the  relation  of  something  to  the  matter  at  hand  [syn:  {relevancy}] 
  [ant:  {irrelevance}] 
 
  From  The  Free  On-line  Dictionary  of  Computing  (13  Mar  01)  [foldoc]: 
 
  relevance 
 
    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) 
 
 

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