This study examined the extent to which variations in relevance assessments affect the evaluation of the performance of full-text retrieval system. Four sets of relevance judgments obtained by examining the full-text of documents were used to test the retrieval effectiveness. There was no noticeable difference in retrieval performance among the four relevance judgment sets. It implies that a variety of definitions of relevance has no effect on the evaluation of the performance of the full-text retrieval system. Furth r retrieval experiments on this topic incorporating relevance feedback, which is one of the sophisticated retrieval techniques using relevance information, are suggested.