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Full-Text Articles in Physical Sciences and Mathematics
When Will Information Retrieval Be “Good Enough”?, James Allan
When Will Information Retrieval Be “Good Enough”?, James Allan
Computer Science Department Faculty Publication Series
We describe a user study that examined the relationship between the quality of an Information Retrieval system and the effectiveness of its users in performing a task. The task involves finding answer facets of questions pertaining to a collection of newswire documents over a six month period. We artificially created sets of ranked lists at increasing levels of quality by blending the output of a state-of-the-art retrieval system with truth data created by annotators. Subjects performed the task by using these ranked lists to guide their labeling of answer passages in the retrieved articles. We found that as system accuracy …
Incremental Test Collections, Ben Carterette, James Allan
Incremental Test Collections, Ben Carterette, James Allan
Computer Science Department Faculty Publication Series
Corpora and topics are readily available for information retrieval research. Relevance judgments, which are necessary for system evaluation, are expensive; the cost of obtaining them prohibits in-house evaluation of retrieval systems on new corpora or new topics. We present an algorithm for cheaply constructing sets of relevance judgments. Our method intelligently selects documents to be judged and decides when to stop in such a way that with very little work there can be a high degree of confidence in the result of the evaluation. We demonstrate the algorithm's effectiveness by showing that it produces small sets of relevance judgments that …