Cyril W. Cleverdon
| Cyril Cleverdon | |
|---|---|
| Born |
9 September 1914 Bristol, UK |
| Died | 4 December 1997 (aged 83) Cranfield, UK |
| Residence | United Kingdom |
| Nationality | British |
| Known for | work on the evaluation of information retrieval systems |
| Awards | Professional Award of the Special Libraries Association (1962), Award of Merit of the American Society for Information Science (1971), The Gerard Salton Award of the Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval of the Association for Computing Machinery (1991) |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Computer Science |
| Institutions | Cranfield Institute of Technology |
Cyril Cleverdon (9 September 1914 – 4 December 1997) was a British librarian and computer scientist who is best known for his work on the evaluation of information retrieval systems.
Cyril Cleverdon was born in Bristol, England. He worked at the Bristol Libraries from 1932 to 1938, and from 1938 to 1946 he was the librarian of the Engine Division of the Bristol Aeroplane Co. Ltd. In 1946 he was appointed librarian of the College of Aeronautics at Cranfield (later the Cranfield Institute of Technology and Cranfield University), where he served until his retirement in 1979, the last two years as professor of Information Transfer Studies.
With the help of NSF funding, Cleverdon started a series of projects in 1957 that lasted for about 10 years in which he and his colleagues set the stage for information retrieval research. In the Cranfield project, retrieval experiments were conducted on test databases in a controlled, laboratory-like setting. The aim of the research was to improve the retrieval effectiveness of information retrieval systems, by developing better indexing languages and methods. The components of the experiments were:
Together, these components form an information retrieval test collection. The test collection serves as a standard for testing retrieval approaches, and the success of each approach is measured in terms of two measures: precision and recall. Test collections and evaluation measures based on precision and recall are driving forces behind modern research on search systems. Cleverdon's approach formed a blueprint for the successful Text Retrieval Conference series that began in 1992.
Not only did Cleverdon's Cranfield studies introduce experimental research into computer science, the outcomes of the project also established the basis of the automatic indexing as done in today's search engines. Essentially, Cleverdon found that the use of single terms from the documents achieved the best retrieval performance, as opposed to manually assigned thesaurus terms, synonyms, etc. These results were very controversial at the time. In the Cranfield 2 Report, Cleverdon said:
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