What deliberately degrading search quality tells us about discount functions

Paul Thomas*, Timothy Jones, David Hawking

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

6 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Deliberate degradation of search results is a common tool in user experiments. We degrade high-quality search results by inserting non-relevant documents at different ranks. The effect of these manipulations, on a number of commonly-used metrics, is counter-intuitive: the discount functions implicit in P@k, MRR, NDCG, and others do not account for the true relationship between rank and value to the user. We propose an alternative, based on visibility data.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationSIGIR'11 - Proceedings of the 34th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
Pages1107-1108
Number of pages2
ISBN (Print)9781450309349
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2011
Event34th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, SIGIR 2011 - Beijing, China
Duration: 24 Jul 201128 Jul 2011

Publication series

NameSIGIR'11 - Proceedings of the 34th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval

Conference

Conference34th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, SIGIR 2011
Country/TerritoryChina
CityBeijing
Period24/07/1128/07/11

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