Evaluation of IR Systems

Adapted from Lectures by Prabhakar Raghavan (Yahoo and Stanford) and Christopher Manning (Stanford)

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This lecture
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Results summaries:
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Making our good results usable to a user

How do we know if our results are any good?

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Evaluating a search engine

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Benchmarks Precision and recall

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Result Summaries
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Having ranked the documents matching a query, we wish to present a results list. Most commonly, a list of the document titles plus a short summary, aka 10 blue links.

Summaries
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The title is typically automatically extracted from document metadata. What about the summaries?
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This description is crucial. User can identify good/relevant hits based on description.

Two basic kinds:

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A static summary of a document is always the same, regardless of the query that hit the doc. A dynamic summary is a query-dependent attempt to explain why the document was retrieved for the query at hand.
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Static summaries
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In typical systems, the static summary is a subset of the document.

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Simplest heuristic: the first 50 (or so this can be varied) words of the document
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Summary cached at indexing time

More sophisticated: extract from each document a set of key sentences

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Simple NLP heuristics to score each sentence Summary is made up of top-scoring sentences.

Most sophisticated: NLP used to synthesize a summary

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Seldom used in IR (cf. text summarization work)

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Dynamic summaries
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Present one or more windows within the document that contain several of the query terms
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KWIC snippets: Keyword in Context presentation

Generated in conjunction with scoring

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If query found as a phrase, all or some occurrences of the phrase in the doc If not, document windows that contain multiple query terms

The summary itself gives the entire content of the window all terms, not only the query terms.

Generating dynamic summaries

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If we have only a positional index, we cannot (easily)

reconstruct context window surrounding hits. If we cache the documents at index time, then we can find windows in it, cueing from hits found in the positional index.
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E.g., positional index says the query is a phrase in position 4378 so we go to this position in the cached document and stream out the content Note: Cached copy can be outdated

Most often, cache only a fixed-size prefix of the doc.

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Dynamic summaries
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Producing good dynamic summaries is a tricky optimization problem

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The real estate for the summary is normally small and fixed Want snippets to be long enough to be useful Want linguistically well-formed snippets Want snippets maximally informative about doc

But users really like snippets, even if they complicate IR system design
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Alternative results presentations?

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An active area of HCI research An alternative: http://www.searchme.com / copies the idea of Apples Cover Flow for search results

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Evaluating search engines

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Measures for a search engine

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How fast does it index

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Number of documents/hour (Average document size) Latency as a function of index size Ability to express complex information needs Speed on complex queries

How fast does it search

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Expressiveness of query language

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Uncluttered UI Is it free?
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Measures for a search engine

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All of the preceding criteria are measurable: we can quantify speed/size; we can make expressiveness precise The key measure: user happiness
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What is this?
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Speed of response/size of index are factors But blindingly fast, useless answers wont make a user happy

Need a way of quantifying user happiness

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Data Retrieval vs Information Retrieval

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DR Performance Evaluation (after establishing correctness)

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Response time Index space

IR Performance Evaluation
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How relevant is the answer set? (required to establish functional correctness, e.g., through benchmarks)
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Measuring user happiness

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Issue: who is the user we are trying to make happy?

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Depends on the setting/context

Web engine: user finds what they want and return to the engine
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Can measure rate of return users

eCommerce site: user finds what they want and make a purchase
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Is it the end-user, or the eCommerce site, whose happiness we measure? Measure time to purchase, or fraction of searchers who become buyers?
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Measuring user happiness

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Enterprise (company/govt/academic): Care about user productivity

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How much time do my users save when looking for information? Many other criteria having to do with breadth of access, secure access, etc.

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Happiness: elusive to measure

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Most common proxy: relevance of search results

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But how do you measure relevance?

We will detail a methodology here, then examine its issues

1. A benchmark document collection 2. A benchmark suite of queries 3. A usually binary assessment of either Relevant or Nonrelevant for each query and each document n Some work on more-than-binary, but not the standard

Relevant measurement requires 3 elements:

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Evaluating an IR system
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Note: the information need is translated into a query Relevance is assessed relative to the information need, not the query
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E.g., Information need: I'm looking for information on whether drinking red wine is more effective at reducing heart attack risks than white wine. Query: wine red white heart attack effective

You evaluate whether the doc addresses the information need, not whether it has these words
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Difficulties with gauging Relevancy

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Relevancy, from a human standpoint, is: n Subjective: Depends upon a specific users judgment. n Situational: Relates to users current needs. n Cognitive: Depends on human perception and behavior. n Dynamic: Changes over time.
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Standard relevance benchmarks

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TREC - National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has run a large IR test bed for many years Reuters and other benchmark doc collections used

Retrieval tasks specified

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sometimes as queries

Human experts mark, for each query and for each doc, Relevant or Nonrelevant
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or at least for subset of docs that some system returned for that query
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Unranked retrieval evaluation: Precision and Recall

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Precision: fraction of retrieved docs that are relevant = P(relevant|retrieved) Recall: fraction of relevant docs that are retrieved = P(retrieved|relevant)
Relevant Retrieved Not Retrieved
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Nonrelevant fp tn

tp fn

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Precision P = tp/(tp + fp) Recall R = tp/(tp + fn)

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Precision and Recall

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Precision and Recall in Practice

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Precision
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The ability to retrieve top-ranked documents that are mostly relevant.

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The fraction of the retrieved documents that are relevant.

Recall
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The ability of the search to find all of the relevant items in the corpus.
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The fraction of the relevant documents that are retrieved.

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Should we instead use the accuracy measure for evaluation?

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Given a query, an engine classifies each doc as Relevant or Nonrelevant The accuracy of an engine: the fraction of these classifications that are correct
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Accuracy is a commonly used evaluation measure in machine learning classification work

Why is this not a very useful evaluation measure in IR?

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Why not just use accuracy?

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How to build a 99.9999% accurate search engine on a low budget.

Search for:

0 matching results found.

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People doing information retrieval want to find something and have a certain tolerance for junk.
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Precision/Recall
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You can get high recall (but low precision) by retrieving all docs for all queries!
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Recall is a non-decreasing function of the number of docs retrieved

In a good system, precision decreases as either the number of docs retrieved or recall increases
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This is not a theorem, but a result with strong empirical confirmation

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Trade-offs
Returns relevant documents but misses many useful ones too The ideal

1 Precision 0

Recall

Returns most relevant documents but includes lot of junk

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Difficulties in using precision/recall

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Should average over large document collection/ query ensembles Need human relevance assessments
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People arent reliable assessors Nuanced assessments? Results may not translate from one domain to another
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Assessments have to be binary

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Heavily skewed by collection/authorship

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A combined measure: F
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Combined measure that assesses precision/recall tradeoff is F measure (harmonic mean):

2 PR F= = 1 1 P+R + P R
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Harmonic mean is a conservative average

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See CJ van Rijsbergen, Information Retrieval

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Aka E Measure (parameterized F Measure)

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Variants of F measure that allow weighting emphasis on precision over recall:

Value of controls trade-off:

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(1 + ) PR (1 + ) E= = 2 1 2 P+R + R P

= 1: Equally weight precision and recall (E=F). > 1: Weight recall more. < 1: Weight precision more.
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F1 and other averages

Combined Measures
100 80 60 40 20 0 0
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Minimum Maximum Arithmetic Geometric Harmonic

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40

60

80

100
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Precision (Recall fixed at 70%)

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Breakeven Point
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Recall vs Precision and F1
1.2

Precision and F1

0.8

0.6

0.4

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0.2

Breakeven point is the point where precision equals recall. Alternative single measure of IR effectiveness. How do you compute it?

0 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 1.2

Recall

Evaluating ranked results

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Evaluation of ranked results:

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The system can return any number of results By taking various numbers of the top returned documents (levels of recall), the evaluator can produce a precision-recall curve

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Computing Recall/Precision Points: An Example

n doc # relevant 1 588 x 2 589 x 3 576 4 590 x 5 986 6 592 x 7 984 8 988 9 578 10 985 11 103 12 591 13 772 x 14 990
Let total # of relevant docs = 6 Check each new recall point: R=1/6=0.167; P=1/1=1 R=2/6=0.333; P=2/2=1 R=3/6=0.5; P=3/4=0.75

R=4/6=0.667; P=4/6=0.667 Missing one relevant document. Never reach R=5/6=0.833; p=5/13=0.38 100% recall
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A precision-recall curve
1.0 0.8

Precision

0.6 0.4 0.2 0.0 0.0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1.0
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Recall

Interpolating a Recall/Precision Curve

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Interpolate a precision value for each standard recall level:

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rj {0.0, 0.1, 0.2, 0.3, 0.4, 0.5, 0.6, 0.7, 0.8, 0.9, 1.0} r0 = 0.0, r1 = 0.1, , r10=1.0

The interpolated precision at the j-th standard recall level is the maximum known precision at any recall level above the j-th level:

P(rj ) = max P(r )

r j r
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Average Recall/Precision Curve

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Typically average performance over a large set of queries. Compute average precision at each standard recall level across all queries. Plot average precision/recall curves to evaluate overall system performance on a document/query corpus.
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Evaluation Metrics (contd)

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Graphs are good, but people want summary measures! n Precision at fixed retrieval level
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Precision-at-k: Precision of top k results Perhaps appropriate for most of web search: all people want are good matches on the first one or two results pages But: averages badly and has an arbitrary parameter of k The standard measure in the early TREC competitions: you take the precision at 11 levels of recall varying from 0 to 1 by tenths of the documents, using interpolation (the value for 0 is always interpolated!), and average them Evaluates performance at all recall levels
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11-point interpolated average precision

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Typical (good) 11 point precisions

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SabIR/Cornell 8A1 11pt precision from TREC 8 (1999)

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0.8

Precision

0.6

0.4

0.2

0 0 0.2 0.4 Recall 0.6 0.8 1

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11 point precisions
120 100 80
Precision

60 40 20 0 0 20 40 60 Recall 80 100 120

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Receiver Operating Characteristics (ROC) Curve

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True positive rate = tp/(tp+fn) = recall = sensitivity False positive rate = fp/(tn+fp). Related to precision. n fpr=0 <-> p=1 Why is the blue line worthless?

Mean average precision (MAP)

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MAP for a query n Average of the precision value for each (of the k top) relevant document retrieved
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This approach weights early appearance of a relevant document over later appearance

MAP for query collection is the arithmetic average of MAP for each query n Macro-averaging: each query counts equally
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Average Precision

Mean Average Precision (MAP)

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Mean Average Precision (MAP)

summarize rankings from multiple queries by averaging average precision n most commonly used measure in research papers n assumes user is interested in finding many relevant documents for each query n requires many relevance judgments in text collection
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MAP

Summarize a Ranking: MAP

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Given that n docs are retrieved n Compute the precision (at rank) where each (new) relevant document is retrieved => p(1), ,p(k), if we have k rel. docs
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E.g., if the first rel. doc is at the 2nd rank, then p(1)=1/2.

If a relevant document never gets retrieved, we assume the precision corresponding to that rel. doc to be zero Compute the average over all the relevant documents n Average precision = (p(1)+p(k))/k
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(contd)
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This gives us (non-interpolated) average precision, which captures both precision and recall and is sensitive to the rank of each relevant document Mean Average Precisions (MAP) n MAP = arithmetic mean average precision over a set of topics n gMAP = geometric mean average precision over a set of topics (more affected by difficult topics)
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Discounted Cumulative Gain

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Popular measure for evaluating web search and related tasks Two assumptions: n Highly relevant documents are more useful than marginally relevant document n the lower the ranked position of a relevant document, the less useful it is for the user, since it is less likely to be examined

Discounted Cumulative Gain

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Uses graded relevance as a measure of usefulness, or gain, from examining a document Gain is accumulated starting at the top of the ranking and may be reduced, or discounted, at lower ranks Typical discount is 1/log (rank) n With base 2, the discount at rank 4 is 1/2, and at rank 8 it is 1/3

Summarize a Ranking: DCG

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What if relevance judgments are in a scale of [1,r]? r>2 Cumulative Gain (CG) at rank n n Let the ratings of the n documents be r1, r2, rn (in ranked order) n CG = r1+r2+rn Discounted Cumulative Gain (DCG) at rank n n DCG = r1 + r2/log22 + r3/log23 + rn/log2n
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We may use any base for the logarithm, e.g., base=b

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Discounted Cumulative Gain

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DCG is the total gain accumulated at a particular rank p:

Alternative formulation:

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used by some web search companies emphasis on retrieving highly relevant documents

DCG Example
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10 ranked documents judged on 0-3 relevance scale:

3, 2, 3, 0, 0, 1, 2, 2, 3, 0

discounted gain:
3, 2/1, 3/1.59, 0, 0, 1/2.59, 2/2.81, 2/3, 3/3.17, 0 = 3, 2, 1.89, 0, 0, 0.39, 0.71, 0.67, 0.95, 0

DCG:
3, 5, 6.89, 6.89, 6.89, 7.28, 7.99, 8.66, 9.61, 9.61

Summarize a Ranking: NDCG

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Normalized Cumulative Gain (NDCG) at rank n n Normalize DCG at rank n by the DCG value at rank n of the ideal ranking n The ideal ranking would first return the documents with the highest relevance level, then the next highest relevance level, etc n Compute the precision (at rank) where each (new) relevant document is retrieved => p(1), ,p(k), if we have k rel. docs NDCG is now quite popular in evaluating Web search
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NDCG - Example
4 documents: d1, d2, d3, d4
Ground Truth i 1 2 3 4 Document Order d4 d3 d2 d1 ri 2 2 1 0 Ranking Func2on1 Document Order d3 d4 d2 d1 ri 2 2 1 0 Ranking Func2on2 Document Order d3 d2 d4 d1 ri 2 1 2 0

NDCGGT=1.00

NDCGRF1=1.00

NDCGRF2=0.9203

2 1 0 DCGGT = 2 + log 2 + log 3 + log 4 = 4.6309 2 2 2 2 1 0 DCGRF1 = 2 + log 2 + log 3 + log 4 = 4.6309 2 2 2 1 2 0 DCGRF 2 = 2 + log 2 + log 3 + log 4 = 4.2619 2 2 2

MaxDCG = DCGGT = 4.6309

NDCG - Example
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Graded ranking/ordering:
4 2 0 1

DCG = 4 + 2/log(2) + 0/log(3) + 1/log(4) n = 6.5 IDCG = 4 + 2/log(2) + 1/log(3) + 0/log(4) n = 6.63 NDCG = DCG/IDCG = 6.5/6.63 = .98
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R- Precision
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Precision at the R-th position in the ranking of results for a query that has R relevant documents.
n doc # relevant 1 588 x 2 589 x 3 576 4 590 x 5 986 6 592 x 7 984 8 988 9 578 10 985 11 103 12 591 13 772 x 14 990

R = # of relevant docs = 6

R-Precision = 4/6 = 0.67

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Variance
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For a test collection, it is usual that a system does crummily on some information needs (e.g., MAP = 0.1) and excellently on others (e.g., MAP = 0.7) Indeed, it is usually the case that the variance in performance of the same system across queries is much greater than the variance of different systems on the same query.
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That is, there are easy information needs and hard ones!
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Test Collections

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Creating Test Collections for IR Evaluation

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From document collections to test collections

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Still need
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Test queries Relevance assessments Must be germane to docs available Best designed by domain experts Random query terms generally not a good idea Human judges, time-consuming Are human panels perfect?
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Test queries
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Relevance assessments
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Can we avoid human judgment?

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Not really Makes experimental work hard

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Especially on a large scale

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In some very specific settings, can use proxies But once we have test collections, we can reuse them (so long as we dont overtrain too badly) Example below, approximate vector space retrieval
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Approximate vector retrieval

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Let G(q) be the ground truth of the actual k closest docs on query q Let A(q) be the k docs returned by approximate algorithm A on query q For performance we would measure A(q) G(q)
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Is this the right measure?

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Alternative proposal
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Focus instead on how A(q) compares to G(q). Goodness can be measured here in cosine proximity to q: we sum up qd over d A(q). Compare this to the sum of qd over d G(q).
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Yields a measure of the relative goodness of A vis--vis G.

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Thus A may be 90% as good as the ground-truth G, without finding 90% of the docs in G. For scored retrieval, this may be acceptable:

Most web engines dont always return the same answers for a given query.
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Kappa measure for inter-judge (dis)agreement

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Kappa measure
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Agreement measure among judges Designed for categorical judgments Corrects for chance agreement

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Kappa = [ P(A) P(E) ] / [ 1 P(E) ] P(A) proportion of time judges agree P(E) what agreement would be by chance Kappa = 0 for chance agreement, 1 for total agreement.

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P(A)? P(E)?

Kappa Measure: Example

Number of docs 300 70 20 10 Judge 1 Relevant Nonrelevant Relevant Nonrelevant Judge 2 Relevant Nonrelevant Nonrelevant Relevant

Kappa Example
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P(A) = 370/400 = 0.925 P(nonrelevant) = (10+20+70+70)/800 = 0.2125 P(relevant) = (10+20+300+300)/800 = 0.7878 P(E) = 0.2125^2 + 0.7878^2 = 0.665 Kappa = (0.925 0.665)/(1-0.665) = 0.776
n n n

Kappa > 0.8 : good agreement 0.67< Kappa <0.8 : tentative conclusions (Carletta 96) Depends on purpose of study

For >2 judges: average pairwise kappas

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Other Evaluation Measures

Adapted from Slides Attributed to Prof. Dik Lee (Univ. of Science and Tech, Hong Kong)

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Fallout Rate
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Problems with both precision and recall:

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Number of irrelevant documents in the collection is not taken into account. Recall is undefined when there is no relevant document in the collection. Precision is undefined when no document is retrieved.

no. of nonrelevant items retrieved Fallout = total no. of nonrelevant items in the collection
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Subjective Relevance Measure

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Novelty Ratio: The proportion of items retrieved and judged relevant by the user and of which they were previously unaware.
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Ability to find new information on a topic.

Coverage Ratio: The proportion of relevant items retrieved out of the total relevant documents known to a user prior to the search.
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Relevant when the user wants to locate documents which they have seen before (e.g., the budget report for Year 2000).

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Other Factors to Consider

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User effort: Work required from the user in formulating queries, conducting the search, and screening the output. Response time: Time interval between receipt of a user query and the presentation of system responses. Form of presentation: Influence of search output format on the users ability to utilize the retrieved materials. Collection coverage: Extent to which any/all relevant items are included in the document corpus.
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SKIP DETAILS

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Early Test Collections

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Previous experiments were based on the SMART collection which is fairly small. (ftp://ftp.cs.cornell.edu/pub/smart) Collection Name CACM CISI CRAN MED TIME Number Of Documents 3,204 1,460 1,400 1,033 425 Number Of Queries 64 112 225 30 83 Raw Size (Mbytes) 1.5 1.3 1.6 1.1 1.5

Different researchers used different test collections and evaluation techniques.

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Critique of pure relevance

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Relevance vs Marginal Relevance

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A document can be redundant even if it is highly relevant Duplicates The same information from different sources Marginal relevance is a better measure of utility for the user.

Using facts/entities as evaluation units more directly measures true relevance. But harder to create evaluation set
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Evaluation at large search engines

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n n n

Search engines have test collections of queries and handranked results Recall is difficult to measure on the web Search engines often use precision at top k, e.g., k = 10 . . . or measures that reward you more for getting rank 1 right than for getting rank 10 right.
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NDCG (Normalized Cumulative Discounted Gain) Clickthrough on first result n Not very reliable if you look at a single clickthrough but pretty reliable in the aggregate. Studies of user behavior in the lab A/B testing L10Evaluation

Search engines also use non-relevance-based measures.

n

n n

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A/B testing
n n

Purpose: Test a single innovation Prerequisite: You have a large search engine up and running.
n n

Have most users use old system Divert a small proportion of traffic (e.g., 1%) to the new system that includes the innovation Evaluate with an automatic measure like clickthrough on first result Now we can directly see if the innovation does improve user happiness. Probably the evaluation methodology that large search engines trust most In principle less powerful than doing a multivariate regression analysis, but easier to understand
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TREC Benchmarks

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The TREC Benchmark

TREC: Text REtrieval Conference (http://trec.nist.gov/) Originated from the TIPSTER program sponsored by Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Became an annual conference in 1992, co-sponsored by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and DARPA. Participants are given parts of a standard set of documents and TOPICS (from which queries have to be derived) in different stages for training and testing. Participants submit the P/R values for the final document and query corpus and present their results at the conference.
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The TREC Objectives

The image cannot be displayed. Your computer may not have enough memory to open the image, or the image may have been corrupted. Restart your computer, and then open the le again. If the red x still appears, you may have to delete the image and then insert it again.

Provide a common ground for comparing different IR techniques.

Same set of documents and queries, and same evaluation method.

Sharing of resources and experiences in developing the benchmark.

With major sponsorship from government to develop large benchmark collections.

Encourage participation from industry and academia. Development of new evaluation techniques, particularly for new applications.
Retrieval, routing/filtering, non-English collection, web-based collection, question answering.
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TREC Advantages
n

n n

Large scale (compared to a few MB in the SMART Collection). Relevance judgments provided. Under continuous development with support from the U.S. Government. Wide participation: n TREC 1: 28 papers 360 pages. n TREC 4: 37 papers 560 pages. n TREC 7: 61 papers 600 pages. n TREC 8: 74 papers.
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TREC Tasks
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Ad hoc: New questions are being asked on a static set of data. Routing: Same questions are being asked, but new information is being searched. (news clipping, library profiling). New tasks added after TREC 5 - Interactive, multilingual, natural language, multiple database merging, filtering, very large corpus (20 GB, 7.5 million documents), question answering.
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TREC
n

TREC Ad Hoc task from first 8 TRECs is standard IR task

n n n

50 detailed information needs a year Human evaluation of pooled results returned More recently other related things: Web track, HARD

A TREC query (TREC 5)

<top> <num> Number: 225 <desc> Description: What is the main function of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the funding level provided to meet emergencies? Also, what resources are available to FEMA such as people, equipment, facilities? </top>
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Standard relevance benchmarks: Others

n

GOV2
n n n n

Another TREC/NIST collection 25 million web pages Largest collection that is easily available But still 3 orders of magnitude smaller than what Google/Yahoo/MSN index East Asian language and cross-language information retrieval This evaluation series has concentrated on European languages and cross-language information retrieval.
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NTCIR
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Cross Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF)

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Characteristics of the TREC Collection

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Both long and short documents (from a few hundred to over one thousand unique terms in a document). Test documents consist of:
WSJ AP ZIFF FR DOE Wall Street Journal articles (1986-1992) Associate Press Newswire (1989) Computer Select Disks (Ziff-Davis Publishing) Federal Register Abstracts from Department of Energy reports 550 M 514 M 493 M 469 M 190 M

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More Details on Document Collections

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Volume 1 (Mar 1994) - Wall Street Journal (1987, 1988, 1989), Federal Register (1989), Associated Press (1989), Department of Energy abstracts, and Information from the Computer Select disks (1989, 1990) Volume 2 (Mar 1994) - Wall Street Journal (1990, 1991, 1992), the Federal Register (1988), Associated Press (1988) and Information from the Computer Select disks (1989, 1990) Volume 3 (Mar 1994) - San Jose Mercury News (1991), the Associated Press (1990), U.S. Patents (1983-1991), and Information from the Computer Select disks (1991, 1992) Volume 4 (May 1996) - Financial Times Limited (1991, 1992, 1993, 1994), the Congressional Record of the 103rd Congress (1993), and the Federal Register (1994). Volume 5 (Apr 1997) - Foreign Broadcast Information Service (1996) and the Los Angeles Times (1989, 1990).

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TREC Disk 4,5

TREC Disk 4 Congressional Record of the 103rd Congress approx. 30,000 documents approx. 235 MB Federal Register (1994) approx. 55,000 documents approx. 395 MB Financial Times (1992-1994) approx. 210,000 documents approx. 565 MB Data provided from the Foreign Broadcast Information Service approx. 130,000 documents approx. 470 MB Los Angeles Times (randomly selected articles from 1989 & 1990) approx. 130,000 document approx. 475 MB
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TREC Disk 5

Prasad

Sample Document (with SGML)

<DOC> <DOCNO> WSJ870324-0001 </DOCNO> <HL> John Blair Is Near Accord To Sell Unit, Sources Say </HL> <DD> 03/24/87</DD> <SO> WALL STREET JOURNAL (J) </SO> <IN> REL TENDER OFFERS, MERGERS, ACQUISITIONS (TNM) MARKETING, ADVERTISING (MKT) TELECOMMUNICATIONS, BROADCASTING, TELEPHONE, TELEGRAPH (TEL) </IN> <DATELINE> NEW YORK </DATELINE> <TEXT> John Blair &amp; Co. is close to an agreement to sell its TV station advertising representation operation and program production unit to an investor group led by James H. Rosenfield, a former CBS Inc. executive, industry sources said. Industry sources put the value of the proposed acquisition at more than $100 million. ... </TEXT> </DOC>

Prasad

L10Evaluation

85

Sample Query (with SGML)

<top> <head> Tipster Topic Description <num> Number: 066 <dom> Domain: Science and Technology <title> Topic: Natural Language Processing <desc> Description: Document will identify a type of natural language processing technology which is being developed or marketed in the U.S. <narr> Narrative: A relevant document will identify a company or institution developing or marketing a natural language processing technology, identify the technology, and identify one of more features of the company's product. <con> Concept(s): 1. natural language processing ;2. translation, language, dictionary <fac> Factor(s): <nat> Nationality: U.S.</nat> </fac> <def> Definitions(s): </top>
Prasad L10Evaluation 86

TREC Properties
n

Both documents and queries contain many different kinds of information (fields). Generation of the formal queries (Boolean, Vector Space, etc.) is the responsibility of the system. n A system may be very good at querying and ranking, but if it generates poor queries from the topic, its final P/R would be poor.
L10Evaluation 87

Prasad

Two more TREC Document Examples

Prasad

L10Evaluation

88

Another Example of TREC Topic/ Query

Prasad

L10Evaluation

89

Evaluation
n

Summary table statistics: Number of topics, number of documents retrieved, number of relevant documents. Recall-precision average: Average precision at 11 recall levels (0 to 1 at 0.1 increments). Document level average: Average precision when 5, 10, .., 100, 1000 documents are retrieved. Average precision histogram: Difference of the Rprecision for each topic and the average R-precision of all systems for that topic.

Prasad

L10Evaluation

90

Prasad

L10Evaluation

91

Cystic Fibrosis (CF) Collection

n n

1,239 abstracts of medical journal articles on CF. 100 information requests (queries) in the form of complete English questions. Relevant documents determined and rated by 4 separate medical experts on 0-2 scale:
n n n

0: Not relevant. 1: Marginally relevant. 2: Highly relevant.

Prasad

L10Evaluation

92

CF Document Fields
n n n n n n n n n

MEDLINE access number Author Title Source Major subjects Minor subjects Abstract (or extract) References to other documents Citations to this document

Prasad

L10Evaluation

93