ThesaHelp: why does directed search succeed for Thesa

Summary

Recall is the ratio of relevant retrievals to relevant items. Precision is the ratio of relevant items to retrieved items. If a search yields a high precision ratio, it typically has a low recall ratio. The problem worsens as the size of the document collection increases. The classic paper is Blair and Maron's 1985 study of the STAIRS document-retrieval system with 350,000 pages (QuoteRef: blaiDC3_1985). They demonstrated that the lawyers who built the collection retrieved less that 20 percent of the relevant documents.

Thesa avoids the tradeoff between recall and precision by a directed search for relevant material. The user locates a relevant topic via keywords, and searches the neighborhood of that topic for other relevant topics. Descriptive titles make a directed search practical because the user culls titles that do not appear relevant. Related topics make directed search exhaustive because every topic is near every other topic.

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