Relevance feedback

Relevance feedback is a feature of some information retrieval systems. The idea behind relevance feedback is to take the results that are initially returned from a given query and to use information about whether or not those results are relevant to perform a new query. We can usefully distinguish between three types of feedback: explicit feedback, implicit feedback, and blind or "pseudo" feedback.

Explicit feedback

Explicit feedback is obtained from assessors of relevance indicating the relevance of a document retrieved for a query. This type of feedback is defined as explicit only when the assessors (or other users of a system) know that the feedback provided is interpreted as relevance judgments.

Users may indicate relevance explicitly using a binary or graded relevance system. Binary relevance feedback indicates that a document is either relevant or irrelevant for a given query. Graded relevance feedback indicates the relevance of a document to a query on a scale using numbers, letters, or descriptions (such as "not relevant", "somewhat relevant", "relevant", or "very relevant"). Graded relevance may also take the form of a cardinal ordering of documents created by an assessor; that is, the assessor places documents of a result set in order of (usually descending) relevance. An example of this would be the SearchWiki feature implemented by Google on their search website.

The relevance feedback information needs to be...
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