ON THE NOTION OF RELEVANCE IN INFORMATION RETRIEVAL

The paper presents a new point of view about the “relevance” concept. The logic of information retrieval is analysed (two‐valued, many‐valued and infinite‐valued logic) and the truth‐value is interpreted as the relevance value. The logical system which seems to be most appropriate to describe the process of information retrieval is the continuous logic suggested by McNoughton. In this case the answer of the information retrieval system is interpreted as a fuzzy set.