User performance versus precision measures for simple search tasks

  • Authors:

  • Andrew Turpin;Falk Scholer

  • Affiliations:

  • RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia;RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia

  • Venue:
  • SIGIR '06 Proceedings of the 29th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

Several recent studies have demonstrated that the type of improvements in information retrieval system effectiveness reported in forums such as SIGIR and TREC do not translate into a benefit for users. Two of the studies used an instance recall task, and a third used a question answering task, so perhaps it is unsurprising that the precision based measures of IR system effectiveness on one-shot query evaluation do not correlate with user performance on these tasks. In this study, we evaluate two different information retrieval tasks on TREC Web-track data: a precision-based user task, measured by the length of time that users need to find a single document that is relevant to a TREC topic; and, a simple recall-based task, represented by the total number of relevant documents that users can identify within five minutes. Users employ search engines with controlled mean average precision (MAP) of between 55% and 95%. Our results show that there is no significant relationship between system effectiveness measured by MAP and the precision-based task. A significant, but weak relationship is present for the precision at one document returned metric. A weak relationship is present between MAP and the simple recall-based task.