Introduction to Information Retrieval

We have seen in the preceding chapters many alternatives in designing an information retrieval (IR) system. How do we know which of these techniques are effective in which applications? Should we use stop lists? Should we stem? Should we use inverse document frequency weighting? IR has developed as a highly empirical discipline, requiring careful and thorough evaluation to demonstrate the superior performance of novel techniques on representative document collections.

In this chapter, we begin with a discussion of measuring the effectiveness of IR systems (Section 8.1) and the test collections that are most often used for this purpose (Section 8.2). We then present the straightforward notion of relevant and nonrelevant documents and the formal evaluation methodology that has been developed for evaluating unranked retrieval results (Section 8.3). This includes explaining the kinds of evaluation measures that are standardly used for document retrieval and related tasks like text classification and why they are appropriate. We then extend these notions and develop further measures for evaluating ranked retrieval results (Section 8.4) and discuss developing reliable and informative test collections (Section 8.5).

We then step back to introduce the notion of user utility, and how it is approximated by the use of document relevance (Section 8.6). The key utility measure is user happiness. Speed of response and the size of the index are factors in user happiness.