Construction Of Test Collections Research Articles

On the Ordering of Pooled Web Pages, Gold Assessments, and Bronze Assessments

The present study leverages a recent opportunity we had to create a new English web search test collection for the NTCIR-16 We Want Web (WWW-4) task, which concluded in June 2022. More specifically, through the test collection construction effort, we examined two factors that may affect the relevance assessments of depth- k pools, which in turn may affect the relative evaluation of different IR systems. The first factor is the document ordering strategy for the assessors, namely, prioritisation (PRI) and randomisation (RND). PRI is a method that has been used in NTCIR tasks for over a decade; it ranks the pooled documents by a kind of pseudorelevance for the assessors. The second factor is assessor type, i.e., Gold or Bronze. Gold assessors are the topic creators and therefore they “know” which documents are (highly) relevant and which are not; Bronze assessors are not the topic creators and may lack sufficient knowledge about the topics. We believe that our study is unique in that the authors of this article served as the Gold assessors when creating the WWW-4 test collection, which enabled us to closely examine why Bronze assessments differ from the Gold ones. Our research questions examine assessor efficiency ( RQ1 ), inter-assessor agreement ( RQ2 ), system ranking similarity with different qrels files ( RQ3 ), system ranking robustness to the choice of test topics ( RQ4 ), and the reasons why Bronze assessors tend to be more liberal than Gold assessors ( RQ5 ). The most remarkable of our results are as follows: First, in the comparisons for RQ1 through RQ4 , it turned out that what may matter more than the document ordering strategy (PRI vs. RND) and the assessor type (Gold vs. Bronze) is how well-motivated and/or well-trained the Bronze assessors are. Second, regarding RQ5 , of the documents originally judged nonrelevant by the Gold assessors contrary to the Bronze assessors in our experiments, almost one half were truly relevant according to the Gold assessors’ own reconsiderations. This result suggests that even Gold assessors are far from perfect; budget permitting, it may be beneficial to hire highly motivated Bronze assessors in addition to Gold assessors so they can complement each other.

Effective collection construction for information retrieval evaluation and optimization

The availability of test collections in Cranfield paradigm has significantly benefited the development of models, methods and tools in information retrieval. Such test collections typically consist of a set of topics, a document collection and a set of relevance assessments. Constructing these test collections requires effort of various perspectives such as topic selection, document selection, relevance assessment, and relevance label aggregation etc. The work in the thesis provides a fundamental way of constructing and utilizing test collections in information retrieval in an effective, efficient and reliable manner. To that end, we have focused on four aspects. We first study the document selection issue when building test collections. We devise an active sampling method for efficient large-scale evaluation [Li and Kanoulas, 2017]. Different from past sampling-based approaches, we account for the fact that some systems are of higher quality than others, and we design the sampling distribution to over-sample documents from these systems. At the same time, the estimated evaluation measures are unbiased, and assessments can be used to evaluate new, novel systems without introducing any systematic error. Then a natural further step is determining when to stop the document selection and assessment procedure. This is an important but understudied problem in the construction of test collections. We consider both the gain of identifying relevant documents and the cost of assessing documents as the optimization goals. We handle the problem under the continuous active learning framework by jointly training a ranking model to rank documents, and estimating the total number of relevant documents in the collection using a "greedy" sampling method [Li and Kanoulas, 2020]. The next stage of constructing a test collection is assessing relevance. We study how to denoise relevance assessments by aggregating from multiple crowd annotation sources to obtain high-quality relevance assessments. This helps to boost the quality of relevance assessments acquired in a crowdsourcing manner. We assume a Gaussian process prior on query-document pairs to model their correlation. The proposed model shows good performance in terms of interring true relevance labels. Besides, it allows predicting relevance labels for new tasks that has no crowd annotations, which is a new functionality of CrowdGP. Ablation studies demonstrate that the effectiveness is attributed to the modelling of task correlation based on the axillary information of tasks and the prior relevance information of documents to queries. After a test collection is constructed, it can be used to either evaluate retrieval systems or train a ranking model. We propose to use it to optimize the configuration of retrieval systems. We use Bayesian optimization approach to model the effect of a δ -step in the configuration space to the effectiveness of the retrieval system, by suggesting to use different similarity functions (covariance functions) for continuous and categorical values, and examine their ability to effectively and efficiently guide the search in the configuration space [Li and Kanoulas, 2018]. Beyond the algorithmic and empirical contributions, work done as part of this thesis also contributed to the research community as the CLEF Technology Assisted Reviews in Empirical Medicine Tracks in 2017, 2018, and 2019 [Kanoulas et al., 2017, 2018, 2019]. Awarded by: University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Supervised by: Evangelos Kanoulas. Available at: https://dare.uva.nl/search?identifier=3438a2b6-9271-4f2c-add5-3c811cc48d42.

Fewer topics? A million topics? Both?! On topics subsets in test collections

When evaluating IR run effectiveness using a test collection, a key question is: What search topics should be used? We explore what happens to measurement accuracy when the number of topics in a test collection is reduced, using the Million Query 2007, TeraByte 2006, and Robust 2004 TREC collections, which all feature more than 50 topics, something that has not been examined in past work. Our analysis finds that a subset of topics can be found that is as accurate as the full topic set at ranking runs. Further, we show that the size of the subset, relative to the full topic set, can be substantially smaller than was shown in past work. We also study the topic subsets in the context of the power of statistical significance tests. We find that there is a trade off with using such sets in that significant results may be missed, but the loss of statistical significance is much smaller than when selecting random subsets. We also find topic subsets that can result in a low accuracy test collection, even when the number of queries in the subset is quite large. These negatively correlated subsets suggest we still lack good methodologies which provide stability guarantees on topic selection in new collections. Finally, we examine whether clustering of topics is an appropriate strategy to find and characterize good topic subsets. Our results contribute to the understanding of information retrieval effectiveness evaluation, and offer insights for the construction of test collections.

Incorporating User Expectations and Behavior into the Measurement of Search Effectiveness

Information retrieval systems aim to help users satisfy information needs. We argue that the goal of the person using the system, and the pattern of behavior that they exhibit as they proceed to attain that goal, should be incorporated into the methods and techniques used to evaluate the effectiveness of IR systems, so that the resulting effectiveness scores have a useful interpretation that corresponds to the users’ search experience. In particular, we investigate the role of search task complexity, and show that it has a direct bearing on the number of relevant answer documents sought by users in response to an information need, suggesting that useful effectiveness metrics must be goal sensitive . We further suggest that user behavior while scanning results listings is affected by the rate at which their goal is being realized, and hence that appropriate effectiveness metrics must be adaptive to the presence (or not) of relevant documents in the ranking. In response to these two observations, we present a new effectiveness metric, INST, that has both of the desired properties: INST employs a parameter T , a direct measure of the user’s search goal that adjusts the top-weightedness of the evaluation score; moreover, as progress towards the target T is made, the modeled user behavior is adapted, to reflect the remaining expectations. INST is experimentally compared to previous effectiveness metrics, including Average Precision (AP), Normalized Discounted Cumulative Gain (NDCG), and Rank-Biased Precision (RBP), demonstrating our claims as to INST’s usefulness. Like RBP, INST is a weighted-precision metric, meaning that each score can be accompanied by a residual that quantifies the extent of the score uncertainty caused by unjudged documents. As part of our experimentation, we use crowd-sourced data and score residuals to demonstrate that a wide range of queries arise for even quite specific information needs, and that these variant queries introduce significant levels of residual uncertainty into typical experimental evaluations. These causes of variability have wide-reaching implications for experiment design, and for the construction of test collections.

기술용어 간 관계추출의 성능평가를 위한 반자동 테스트 컬렉션 구축 프레임워크 개발

Due to the increase of the attention on relation extraction systems, the construction of test collections for assessing their performance has emerged as an important task. In this paper, we propose semi-automatic framework capable of constructing test collections for relation extraction on a large scale. Based on this framework, we develop a test collection which can assess the performance of various approaches to extracting relations between technical terminologies in scientific literatures. This framework can minimize the cost of constructing this kind of collections and reduce the intrinsic fluctuations which may come from the diversity in characteristics of collection developers. Furthermore, we can construct balanced and objective collections by means of controlling the selection process of seed documents and terminologies using the proposed framework.

Evaluating Chinese Text Retrieval with Multilingual Queries

This paper reports the design of a Chinese test collection with multilingual queries and the application of this test collection to evaluate information retrieval (IR) systems. The effective indexing units, IR models, translation techniques, and query expansion for Chinese text retrieval are identified. The collaboration of East Asian countries for construction of test collections for cross-language multilingual text retrieval is also discussed in this paper. As well, a tool is designed to help assessors judge relevance and gather the events of relevance judgment. The log file created by this tool will be used to analyze the behaviors of assessors in the future.

The simple scalability of documents

The relationship between scaling practice and scaling theory remains a controversial problem in Information Retrieval research and experimentation. This article reports a test of a general theory of scaling, i.e., Simple Scalability, applied to the stimulus domain of documents represented as abstracts. The significance of Simple Scalability is that it implies three important properties of scales: transitivity, substitutibility, and independence. The test results indicate that, with some reservations, this theory of scaling is applicable to documents. This finding is further applied to the construction of test collections for Information Retrieval research that could more sensitively measure retrieval system alterations through the use of documents scaled not merely by relevance, but rather, by preference. © 1990 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.