On Jan 3, 2011, at 3:32 PM, Dinesh B Vadhia wrote: > We could end-up in a hair-splitting hole. Sounds like you want to be able to > identify things (items) that are relevant and important. You could also say, > items that are relevant and of value.
Yes, I would agree. > > Describing the use-case might help? The use case is I am writing on the topic (well, a bunch of topics) and the thought occurred to me that an organizing principal of this particular section is best summed up by the word Importance, namely "Identifying Important Content and People". What I would like to be able to do is point a user at the most relevant/important research in the area as well as some open source implementations that help solve the problem and also provide the basic theory behind it. When I first outlined the section, I was mainly going to focus on graph algorithms like PageRank, but it occurred to me recently that it was broader than that. Hence the question being aimed more at the academic side of the equation and not so much at the implementation side (besides, I would agree with most others here that the actual implementations focus on either categorization or graph approaches.) From Twitter, there were other suggestions of things to look into: significance, novelty, surprisal, information gain. > > > > > From: Grant Ingersoll > Sent: Monday, January 03, 2011 11:41 AM > To: [email protected] > Subject: Re: [slightly off topic] Determining Importance > > > I guess Relevance is a useful word to describe it, but I don't think it > resonates as well (that is, Joe on the street is much more likely to say > "That is important to me" than to say "That is relevant to me".) > > If we split hairs, Wikipedia defines relevance as "... how pertinent, > connected, or applicable something is to a given matter." Webster has > important as "marked by or indicative of significant worth or consequence : > valuable in content or relationship" -- I think importance has a stronger > connotation than relevance. Under these definitions, I think something can > be relevant but still not be important. Certainly everything that is > important is also relevant. And certainly all the studies around relevance > are important (!) to the discussion, but what I'm getting at is a bit deeper > (I think, but I can be dissuaded). > > I would also agree with Ted here in that I don't think PageRank is > necessarily a measure of relevance (the page, after all, is on the given > matter or not based on it's keywords, but it is Important because of the fact > that everyone else has said so). I also wonder if we aren't clouded by the > use of relevance in search terms, particularly in keyword-based approaches. > Importance to me factors in many other things (including personalization). > Again, maybe I'm splitting hairs. > > -Grant > > On Jan 3, 2011, at 2:19 PM, Ted Dunning wrote: > >> That is close, but I think that there is something else going on with this >> as well. >> >> Is page rank a measure of relevance? Not really (to my mind) >> >> Relevance has a strong notion of context. What is relevant to me in one >> moment may not be relevant the next moment. >> >> On Mon, Jan 3, 2011 at 11:13 AM, Dinesh B Vadhia >> <[email protected]>wrote: >> >>> Yep, what I'd call it too - relevance. >>> >>> >>> >>> From: Jake Mannix >>> Sent: Monday, January 03, 2011 10:48 AM >>> To: [email protected] >>> Subject: Re: [slightly off topic] Determining Importance >>> >>> >>> I've got one word for you, Grant: >>> >>> Relevance. >>> >>> > > -------------------------- > Grant Ingersoll > http://www.lucidimagination.com > -------------------------- Grant Ingersoll http://www.lucidimagination.com
