Strategic system comparisons via targeted relevance judgments

  • Authors:

  • Alistair Moffat;William Webber;Justin Zobel

  • Affiliations:

  • The University of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia;The University of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia;RMIT University, Victoria, Australia

  • Venue:
  • SIGIR '07 Proceedings of the 30th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

Relevance judgments are used to compare text retrieval systems. Given a collection of documents and queries, and a set of systems being compared, a standard approach to forming judgments is to manually examine all documents that are highly ranked by any of the systems. However, not all of these relevance judgments provide the same benefit to the final result, particularly if the aim is to identify which systems are best, rather than to fully order them. In this paper we propose new experimental methodologies that can significantly reduce the volume of judgments required in system comparisons. Using rank-biased precision, a recently proposed effectiveness measure, we show that judging around 200 documents for each of 50 queries in a TREC-scale system evaluation containing over 100 runs is sufficient to identify the best systems.