Yup- the one-word story would be 'interesting' rather than 'relevant'.
Context matters: anything from the searcher to moment-to-moment
differences. Intertwined with this is attention.
In econ-speak, the user has a resource called 'attention'. You are
talking about optimizing the utils received when the user spends this
resource. ('util' is a unitless measure of'what you got when you
spent'.)
Lance
On Mon, Jan 3, 2011 at 2:30 PM, Grant Ingersoll <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> 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
>
>
--
Lance Norskog
[email protected]
