Automatic term class construction using relevance—A summary of work in automatic pseudoclassification

Term classifications and thesauri can be used for many purposes in automatic information retrieval. Normally a thesaurus is generated manually by subject experts: alternatively, the associations between the terms can be obtained automatically by using the occurrence characteristics of the terms across the documents of a collection. A third possibility consists in taking into account user relevance assessments of certain documents with respect to certain queries in order to build term classes designed to retrieve the relevant documents and simultaneously to reject the nonrelevant documents. This last strategy, known as pseudoclassification, produces a user-dependent term classification.A number of pseudoclassification studies are summarized in the present report, and conclusions are reached concerning the effectiveness and feasibility of constructing term classifications based on human relevance assessments.