Evaluation of Temporal Change in IR Test Collections

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Keller, Jüri, Breuer, Timo, Schaer, Philipp
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866929404966338560
author Keller, Jüri
Breuer, Timo
Schaer, Philipp
author_facet Keller, Jüri
Breuer, Timo
Schaer, Philipp
contents Information retrieval systems have been evaluated using the Cranfield paradigm for many years. This paradigm allows a systematic, fair, and reproducible evaluation of different retrieval methods in fixed experimental environments. However, real-world retrieval systems must cope with dynamic environments and temporal changes that affect the document collection, topical trends, and the individual user's perception of what is considered relevant. Yet, the temporal dimension in IR evaluations is still understudied. To this end, this work investigates how the temporal generalizability of effectiveness evaluations can be assessed. As a conceptual model, we generalize Cranfield-type experiments to the temporal context by classifying the change in the essential components according to the create, update, and delete operations of persistent storage known from CRUD. From the different types of change different evaluation scenarios are derived and it is outlined what they imply. Based on these scenarios, renowned state-of-the-art retrieval systems are tested and it is investigated how the retrieval effectiveness changes on different levels of granularity. We show that the proposed measures can be well adapted to describe the changes in the retrieval results. The experiments conducted confirm that the retrieval effectiveness strongly depends on the evaluation scenario investigated. We find that not only the average retrieval performance of single systems but also the relative system performance are strongly affected by the components that change and to what extent these components changed.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2407_01373
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Evaluation of Temporal Change in IR Test Collections
Keller, Jüri
Breuer, Timo
Schaer, Philipp
Information Retrieval
Information retrieval systems have been evaluated using the Cranfield paradigm for many years. This paradigm allows a systematic, fair, and reproducible evaluation of different retrieval methods in fixed experimental environments. However, real-world retrieval systems must cope with dynamic environments and temporal changes that affect the document collection, topical trends, and the individual user's perception of what is considered relevant. Yet, the temporal dimension in IR evaluations is still understudied. To this end, this work investigates how the temporal generalizability of effectiveness evaluations can be assessed. As a conceptual model, we generalize Cranfield-type experiments to the temporal context by classifying the change in the essential components according to the create, update, and delete operations of persistent storage known from CRUD. From the different types of change different evaluation scenarios are derived and it is outlined what they imply. Based on these scenarios, renowned state-of-the-art retrieval systems are tested and it is investigated how the retrieval effectiveness changes on different levels of granularity. We show that the proposed measures can be well adapted to describe the changes in the retrieval results. The experiments conducted confirm that the retrieval effectiveness strongly depends on the evaluation scenario investigated. We find that not only the average retrieval performance of single systems but also the relative system performance are strongly affected by the components that change and to what extent these components changed.
title Evaluation of Temporal Change in IR Test Collections
topic Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.01373