RE: proposal: replace 'rank' property with score'

At 05:01 PM 7/24/98 PDT, Babich, Alan wrote:
>(1) For some systems, the score of a document
>relative to a query depends upon the collection in
>which the document exists. ... When merging
>multiple result streams ordered on score,
>the scores across collections need to be
>comparable.

Merging scores from heterogeneous document engines is too hard for DASL
1.0.  You need a lot of statistics about the various collections.  My
reading of the STARTS document is that they never managed to get vendors to
implement the features that would have returned such information.  Seems to
me that trying to codify this in 1.0 i too hard.   

I like your proposal

>(2) We should still say words to the effect that
>"a larger number for score means the document
>is judged to be more relevant to the query"
>so there is no ambiguity.

and think it's enough for now

Received on Friday, 24 July 1998 20:09:38 UTC