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The Good, the Bad, the Difficult, and the Easy: Something Wrong with Information Retrieval Evaluation?

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 4956))

Abstract

TREC-like evaluations do not consider topic ease and difficulty. However, it seems reasonable to reward good effectiveness on difficult topics more than good effectiveness on easy topics, and to penalize bad effectiveness on easy topics more than bad effectiveness on difficult topics. This paper shows how this approach leads to evaluation results that could be more reasonable, and that are different to some extent. I provide a general analysis of this issue, propose a novel framework, and experimentally validate a part of it.

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References

  1. Mizzaro, S., Robertson, S.: HITS Hits TREC - Exploring IR Evaluation Results with Network Analysis. In: 30th SIGIR, pp. 479–486 (2007)

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  2. Robertson, S.: On GMAP – and other transformations. In: 13th CIKM, pp. 78–83 (2006)

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  3. Voorhees, E.M.: Overview of the TREC 2005 Robust Retrieval Track. In: TREC 2005 Proceedings (2005)

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  4. Voorhees, E.M., Harman, D.K.: TREC — Experiment and Evaluation in Information Retrieval. MIT Press, Cambridge (2005)

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Craig Macdonald Iadh Ounis Vassilis Plachouras Ian Ruthven Ryen W. White

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© 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Mizzaro, S. (2008). The Good, the Bad, the Difficult, and the Easy: Something Wrong with Information Retrieval Evaluation?. In: Macdonald, C., Ounis, I., Plachouras, V., Ruthven, I., White, R.W. (eds) Advances in Information Retrieval. ECIR 2008. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4956. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-78646-7_71

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-78646-7_71

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-78645-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-78646-7

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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