Consensus vs frequency: An empirical investigation of the theories for identifying descriptors in designing retrieval thesauri

摘要

The present-day guidlines for thesaurus design recommend the two different strategies—the committee and empirical approaches—for identifying candidate terms. An argument is made that the basis for the recommendation is the assumption that the knowledge based on the consensus of experts of a field is different from the knowledge expressed in the literature of that field. An experiment was conducted to test the validity of this assumption. The finding that the two strategies failed to generate the two significantly different lists of terms challenges the validity of the assumption and raises several important questions to the theorists who write the guidelines for thesaurus design and to those who must put the guidelines into practice for design of a thesaurus.