Relevance

4 definitions found

From The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48 [gcide]:

  Relevance \Rel"e*vance\ (r?l"?*vans), Relevancy \Rel"e*van*cy\
     (-van*s?), n.
     1. The quality or state of being relevant; pertinency;
        applicability.
        [1913 Webster]
  


              Its answer little meaning, little relevancy bore.
                                                    --Poe.
        [1913 Webster]
  
     2. (Scots Law) Sufficiency to infer the conclusion.
        [1913 Webster]

From WordNet (r) 2.0 [wn]:

  relevance
       n : the relation of something to the matter at hand [syn: {relevancy}]
           [ant: {irrelevance}]

From Moby Thesaurus II by Grady Ward, 1.0 [moby-thes]:

  85 Moby Thesaurus words for "relevance":
     account, admissibility, advantage, affective meaning, affinity,
     applicability, application, appositeness, appropriateness,
     aptitude, aptness, bearing, coloring, concern, concernment,
     connection, connotation, consequence, denotation, drift, effect,
     essence, extension, felicity, fitness, fittedness, force,
     germaneness, gist, grammatical meaning, idea, impact, implication,
     import, intension, interest, lexical meaning, literal meaning,
     materiality, meaning, overtone, pertinence, pith, point,
     practical consequence, propriety, purport, qualification,
     range of meaning, real meaning, reference, referent, regard,
     relatedness, relation, respect, scope, semantic cluster,
     semantic field, sense, service, serviceability, significance,
     signification, significatum, signifie, span of meaning, spirit,
     structural meaning, substance, suitability, suitableness, sum,
     sum and substance, symbolic meaning, tenor, tie-in,
     totality of associations, transferred meaning, unadorned meaning,
     undertone, use, usefulness, utility, value
  
  

From The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (27 SEP 03) [foldoc]:

  relevance
       
           A measure of how closely a given object
          (file, {web page}, database {record}, etc.) matches a user's
          search for information.
       
          The relevance {algorithms} used in most large web {search
          engines} today are based on fairly simple word-occurence
          measurement: if the word "daffodil" occurs on a given page,
          then that page is considered relevant to a {query} on the word
          "daffodil"; and its relevance is quantised as a factor of the
          number of times the word occurs in the page, on whether
          "daffodil" occurs in title of the page or in its META
          keywords, in the first {N} words of the page, in a heading,
          and so on; and similarly for words that a {stemmer} says are
          based on "daffodil".
       
          More elaborate (and resource-expensive) relevance algorithms
          may involve thesaurus (or {synonym ring}) lookup; e.g. it
          might rank a document about narcissuses (but which may not
          mention the word "daffodil" anywhere) as relevant to a query
          on "daffodil", since narcissuses and daffodils are basically
          the same thing.  Ditto for queries on "jail" and "gaol", etc.
       
          More elaborate forms of thesaurus lookup may involve
          multilingual thesauri (e.g. knowing that documents in Japanese
          which mention the Japanese word for "narcissus" are relevant
          to your search on "narcissus"), or may involve thesauri (often
          auto-generated) based not on equivalence of meaning, but on
          word-proximity, such that "bulb" or "bloom" may be in the
          thesaurus entry for "daffodil".
       
          {Word spamming} essentially attempts to falsely increase a web
          page's relevance to certain common searches.
       
          See also {subject index}.
       
          (1997-04-09)