Characteristics of texts affecting relevance judgments

We report on preliminary results from two studies, investigating the factors which underlie people's judgments of the relevance or usefulness of documents to particular information problems. The studies aimed to see whether factors other than topical relevance are significant in such decisions, to identify any such factors, and to relate such factors both to the users' situations and goals, and to representation and retrieval strategies for IR systems, which would take account of such factors. Six facets of the judgment of document usefulness or relevance were identified, only two of which seem directly related to topical relevance. These facets are interpreted in the framework of user goals and situation, and some example strategies for their use in IR systems are presented.