The term relevance weighting method has been shown to produce optimal information retrieval queries under well‐defined conditions. Unfortunately, the relevance weights cannot be determined in the absence of accurate knowledge of the occurrence frequencies of the terms in the relevant and...

The development of a given discipline in science and technology often depends on the availability of theories capable of describing the processes which control the field and of modelling the interactions between these processes. The absence of an accepted theory of information retrieval has been...