THE PROBABILITY RANKING PRINCIPLE IN IR

The principle that, for optimal retrieval, documents should be ranked in order of the probability of relevance or usefulness has been brought into question by Cooper. It is shown that the principle can be justified under certain assumptions, but that in cases where these assumptions do not hold, the principle is not valid. The major problem appears to lie in the way the principle considers each document independently of the rest. The nature of the information on the basis of which the system decides whether or not to retrieve the documents determines whether the document‐by‐document approach is valid.