Inferential representation of science documents

摘要

The most important role of document representation is to help the system, intermediary, and the user effectively search the system and judge the meaning and relevance of a document. The existing document representation methods have the assumption that the meaning of a document is inherent in the document. But several research results revealed that the meaning and the relevance of a document can be different for different users. Considering that the effectiveness of information retrieval is the similarity among the relevance judgments of the system, intermediary and the user, the incorrect assumption can result in ineffective information retrieval. In this study, the inferential communication model, which implies that the meaning of a document is inferred in the context of the user's situation to result in different meanings for users in different situations, is used to study an inferential science document representation method. Through this study, several topical components and nontopical components of the science document were found as the inferred meanings of the document. These show the science document aspects which are used for relevance judgments. Science documents need to be represented in terms of these aspects for effective system's, intermediary's, and user's judgments of the meaning and the relevance of the document.