[OPEN-ILS-DEV] ***SPAM*** a question/comment about relevance ranking

[Daniluk, Judy]

Here in North Texas we are on 1.4, but we had a similar problem.  A keyword search on "wildlife" would have many pages of results, but items where "Wildlife" was the complete one-word title would be buried many pages down instead of at the top.  We knew Evergreen could do better because a similar search on the Georgia PINES catalog would correctly bring the one-word titles to the top.  
 
Our Evergreen support is handled by Equinox. Once the problem was brought to their attention, they were able to fix the problem.  I don't know how they did it - something about adjusting relevancy ranking weights.
 
 
Judy Daniluk
Technology Consultant, North Texas Regional Library System
6320 Southwest Blvd, Suite 101, Fort Worth, TX 76109
jdaniluk at ntrls.org         817-201-6778 (cell)      817-377-4440 (office)        www.ntrls.org <http://www.ntrls.org/>  
 

________________________________

From: open-ils-dev-bounces at list.georgialibraries.org on behalf of Melissa Belvadi
Sent: Wed 1/13/2010 11:39 AM
To: open-ils-dev at list.georgialibraries.org
Subject: [OPEN-ILS-DEV] ***SPAM*** a question/comment about relevance ranking



We are now on 1.6. I still don't understand the relevance ranking system, or perhaps disagree with it, or maybe we can tweak it locally? 


Here's a search I just did:  keyword: food society 


The very first hit, sorted by "relevance" was: 

Free radicals and oxidative stress : environment, drugs and food additives / organized and edited by C. Rice-Evans, B. Halliwell and G.G. Lunt. 

Somewhere in the "local notes" was a mention of the publication being affiliated with a professional society. The word society appears in the author and that note, but not in title or subject headings. 


The next several were more or less the same kind as the first. 


Way down at position 9 was this gem, which is exactly the kind of book  I had in mind: 

The Cultural feast : an introduction to food and society / Carol A. Bryant ... [et al.]. 


As a librarian, I would expect that matches to my keywords appearing in the title to have the very highest weight, then (or possibly co-equal) subject headings, and much lower down in the formula would be 5xx fields and author fields. 


Is this a philosophical problem or a technical one? Can we modify the ranking algorithm locally at the level of individual MARC tags or even index groupings (eg things in the title index, subject index, etc.)? 


Thanks! 


Melissa 



---
Melissa Belvadi
Emerging Technologies & Metadata Librarian
University of Prince Edward Island
mbelvadi at upei.ca
902-566-0581 



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