A Search For Relevance

A Search for Relevance collects previously published essays by Rob Barnard, a modern potter, that chronicle the thoughts, feelings and beliefs that helped confirm his perception that pottery is capable of expressing the same kind of serious thoughts and feelings found in all other forms of art. These articles act as a public diary of Barnard's search for relevance as a potter in contemporary Western society. The analyses and opinions contained in these essays are not theoretical. They are a direct consequence of Barnard's material struggle to understand the ability of pottery to profoundly address the human condition. Barnard argues that the making of any kind of serious art, whether it is painting, sculpture, photography or pottery, can only be sustained if this kind of powerful experience is at the core of the motivation for its creation. In exploring how pottery, and other so-called traditional crafts, might still be relevant in modern culture Barnard asks; Where should contemporary craftspeople look for influence? What is in the basic nature of all crafts throughout history that makes it so important to us as human beings? By what standards should we judge contemporary crafts? For serious artists searching for relevancy these essays highlight one path towards living on the frontiers of your art.

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In plain, uncomplicated language, and using detailed examples to explain the key concepts, models, and algorithms in vertical search ranking, Relevance Ranking for Vertical Search Engines teaches readers how to manipulate ranking algorithms to achieve better results in real-world applications. This reference book for professionals covers concepts and theories from the fundamental to the advanced, such as relevance, query intention, location-based relevance ranking, and cross-property ranking. It covers the most recent developments in vertical search ranking applications, such as freshness-based relevance theory for new search applications, location-based relevance theory for local search applications, and cross-property ranking theory for applications involving multiple verticals. Foreword by Ron Brachman, Chief Scientist and Head, Yahoo! Labs Introduces ranking algorithms and teaches readers how to manipulate ranking algorithms for the best results Covers concepts and theories from the fundamental to the advanced Discusses the state of the art: development of theories and practices in vertical search ranking applications Includes detailed examples, case studies and real-world situations

When people speak, their words never fully encode what they mean, and the context is always compatible with a variety of interpretations. How can comprehension ever be achieved? Wilson and Sperber argue that comprehension is a process of inference guided by precise expectations of relevance. What are the relations between the linguistically encoded meanings studied in semantics and the thoughts that humans are capable of entertaining and conveying? How should we analyse literal meaning, approximations, metaphors and ironies? Is the ability to understand speakers' meanings rooted in a more general human ability to understand other minds? How do these abilities interact in evolution and in cognitive development? Meaning and Relevance sets out to answer these and other questions, enriching and updating relevance theory and exploring its implications for linguistics, philosophy, cognitive science and literary studies.

What do the London Science Museum, California Shakespeare Theater, and ShaNaNa have in common? They are all fighting for relevance in an often indifferent world. The Art of Relevance is your guide to mattering more to more people. You'll find inspiring examples, rags-to-relevance case studies, research-based frameworks, and practical advice on how your work can be more vital to your community. Whether you work in museums or libraries, parks or theaters, churches or afterschool programs, relevance can work for you. Break through shallow connection. Unlock meaning for yourself and others. Find true relevance and shine.

In 1992, shortly after the publication of the first edition of Relevance: communication and cognition, David Trotter wrote: “Relevance theory is not only the most elegant version of pragmatics currently available, but the most uncompromising in its view that inference cannot be assimilated to a code model of communication. It asks questions which literary criticism has never been able to ask, let alone answer”. Thirty years on, new questions continue to be asked (and answered) in linguistic pragmatics, cognitive science, literary theory (as foreseen by Trotter), experimental psychology, affective science, communication studies etc. The theory also appears in quite unexpected places: recent applications of relevance theory include the analysis of internet-mediated discourse, clinical practice and even museum curation. First and foremost, however, relevance theory is an inferential model of communication and cognition which is theoretically and empirically testable. The approach still has a huge amount of potential in psychology and beyond, potential this Research Topic seeks to tap into.

Everybody knows what relevance is. It is a "ya'know" notion, concept, idea–no need to explain whatsoever. Searching for relevant information using information technology (IT) became a ubiquitous activity in contemporary information society. Relevant information means information that pertains to the matter or problem at hand—it is directly connected with effective communication. The purpose of this book is to trace the evolution and with it the history of thinking and research on relevance in information science and related fields from the human point of view. The objective is to synthesize what we have learned about relevance in several decades of investigation about the notion in information science. This book deals with how people deal with relevance—it does not cover how systems deal with relevance; it does not deal with algorithms. Spurred by advances in information retrieval (IR) and information systems of various kinds in handling of relevance, a number of basic questions are raised: But what is relevance to start with? What are some of its properties and manifestations? How do people treat relevance? What affects relevance assessments? What are the effects of inconsistent human relevance judgments on tests of relative performance of different IR algorithms or approaches? These general questions are discussed in detail.

A modern information retrieval system must have the capability to find, organize and present very different manifestations of information – such as text, pictures, videos or database records – any of which may be of relevance to the user. However, the concept of relevance, while seemingly intuitive, is actually hard to define, and it's even harder to model in a formal way. Lavrenko does not attempt to bring forth a new definition of relevance, nor provide arguments as to why any particular definition might be theoretically superior or more complete. Instead, he takes a widely accepted, albeit somewhat conservative definition, makes several assumptions, and from them develops a new probabilistic model that explicitly captures that notion of relevance. With this book, he makes two major contributions to the field of information retrieval: first, a new way to look at topical relevance, complementing the two dominant models, i.e., the classical probabilistic model and the language modeling approach, and which explicitly combines documents, queries, and relevance in a single formalism; second, a new method for modeling exchangeable sequences of discrete random variables which does not make any structural assumptions about the data and which can also handle rare events. Thus his book is of major interest to researchers and graduate students in information retrieval who specialize in relevance modeling, ranking algorithms, and language modeling.