Precision

Precision in Legal Information Retrieval

The following is a basic concept of Precision in relation to information retrieval. In addition to this, Precision may be applied to legal texts, including case law, legislation and scholarly works. Precision and Recall are traditional measures of retrieval effectiveness. While true recall is difficult, if not impossible, to determine, precision is easy to calculate — at least it would be easy if making relevance judgments were easy. It is based only on retrieved documents. Its the ratio between the number of relevant documents retrieved over all the documents retrieved — both the relevant documents and the junk: precision = number of relevant documents retrieved / number of all documents retrieved.