Cyril W. Cleverdon

Cyril Cleverdon (September 9, 1914 – December 4, 1997) was a British librarian and computer scientist who is best known for his work on the evaluation of information retrieval systems.

Life

Cyril Cleverdon was born in Bristol, England in 1914. 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.

Career Contributions

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. He joined and later was elected the council chairman of the Association of Special Libraries and Information Bureau (Aslib) in 1957.

With National Science Foundation 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. The Cranfield 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. Cleverdon's approach formed a blueprint for the successful Text REtrieval Conference (TREC) 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. Cleverdon’s most well-known studies were Cranfield 1 and Cranfield 2.

Cyril Cleverdon also ran, for many years, the Cranfield conferences, which provided a major international forum for discussion of ideas and research in information retrieval. This function was taken over by the SIGIR conferences in the 1970s. Later publications by Cleverdon also focused on information retrieval. A paper in 1972, “On the Inverse Relationship of Recall and Precision” focused on how the number of citations created in turn decreases the number of useful citations available.

Publications

Cyril Cleverdon (1962). “Report on the Testing and Analysis of an Investigation into the Comparative Efficiency of Indexing Systems.” The College of Aeronautics, Cranfield.[1]
Cyril Cleverdon and Michael Keen (1966). “Factors Determining the Performance of Indexing Systems, Volume 2.” The College of Aeronautics, Cranfield.[2]
Cleverdon, C. (1968). Dealing with Literature. Nature 218: 44. https://doi.org/10.1038/218044a0
Cyril Cleverdon (1972). “On the Inverse Relationship of Recall and Precision.” Journal of Documentation 28 (3): 195–201. https://doi.org/10.1108/eb026538
Cleverdon C. (1984). Optimizing convenient online access to bibliographic databases. Information Services and Use 4 (1-2): 37-47. https://doi.org/10.3233/ISU-1984-41-204
Cyril Cleverdon. (1997). The Cranfield tests on index language devices. In Karen Sparck Jones & Peter Willett (Eds.), Readings in information retrieval (pp. 47–59). San Francisco, CA, USA: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers Inc. https://doi.org/10.5555/275537.275544

Awards

The Gerard Salton Award of the Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval of the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery), 1991
ASIST Award of Merit, 1970
Professional Award of the Special Libraries Association, 1962

Life

Career Contributions

Publications

Awards

Further Reading