Relationship between index term specificity and relevance judgment

Concurrent concepts of specificity are discussed and differentiated from each other to investigate the relationship between index term specificity and users’ relevance judgments. The identified concepts are term-document specificity, hierarchical specificity, statement specificity, and posting specificity. Among them, term-document specificity, which is a relationship between an index term and the document indexed with the term, is regarded as a fruitful research area. In an experiment involving three searches with 175 retrieved documents from 356 matched index terms, the impact of specificity on relevance judgments is analyzed and found to be statistically significant. Implications for index practice and for future research are discussed.