Specificity

Specificity

Operational Specificity in Legal Information Retrieval

The following is a basic concept of Operational Specificity in relation to information retrieval. In addition to this, Operational Specificity may be applied to legal texts, including case law, legislation and scholarly works. Elaine Svenonius (1971) redefined specificity in terms of the number of postings associated with a term or descriptor and called it operational specificity. This has also been the definition used in most subsequent information science research on specificity. The fewer the postings, the higher the level of operational specificity. Terms linked to few documentary units are considered to be highly specific. Terms linked with many documentary units are considered to lack specificity. Karen Sparck Jones (1972) called this statistical specificity.

Specificity in Legal Information Retrieval

The following is a basic concept of Specificity in relation to information retrieval. In addition to this, Specificity may be applied to legal texts, including case law, legislation and scholarly works. Specificity has been a rather slippery term with respect to its meaning and applications in library and information science. In this book, specificity refers to the degree or closeness of fit or correspondence between the meaning of an index term or descriptor and the topic or feature to which it refers in a message, text, and documentary unit. This is the semantic term-document relational definition. See also chapter 10, especially section 10.1. where several definitions of specificity are discussed. And see also these alternative definitions: operational specificity, hierarchical specificity, and statement/heading specificity.


Posted

in

,

by

Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *