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RATE: A Reliability-Aware Tester-Based Evaluation Framework of User Simulators

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Advances in Information Retrieval (ECIR 2022)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 13185))

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Abstract

Evaluation of user simulators is needed in order to use them for evaluating Interactive Information Retrieval (IIR) Systems. Previous work has proposed a tester-based approach to evaluate user simulators, but it has not addressed the important question about the reliability of the testers themselves, nor has it studied how to generate a single reliability score for a user simulator based on multiple testers. In this paper, we address these two limitations and propose a novel Reliability-Aware Tester-based Evaluation (RATE) framework for evaluating the reliability of both User Simulators and testers. In this framework, the reliability of Testers and that of Simulators are jointly learned through unsupervised learning using iterative propagation of reliability. We propose and evaluate two algorithms for unsupervised learning of reliabilities. Evaluation results using TREC data sets show that the proposed RATE framework is effective in measuring the reliability of simulators and testers, thus serving as a foundation for potentially establishing a new paradigm for evaluating IIR systems using user simulation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA

    Sahiti Labhishetty & ChengXiang Zhai

Authors
  1. Sahiti Labhishetty
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  2. ChengXiang Zhai
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Correspondence to Sahiti Labhishetty .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, Halle, Germany

    Matthias Hagen

  2. Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands

    Suzan Verberne

  3. University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK

    Craig Macdonald

  4. University of Duisburg-Essen, Essen, Germany

    Christin Seifert

  5. University of Stavanger, Stavanger, Norway

    Krisztian Balog

  6. Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway

    Kjetil Nørvåg

  7. University of Stavanger, Stavanger, Norway

    Vinay Setty

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Labhishetty, S., Zhai, C. (2022). RATE: A Reliability-Aware Tester-Based Evaluation Framework of User Simulators. In: Hagen, M., et al. Advances in Information Retrieval. ECIR 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13185. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99736-6_23

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99736-6_23

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-99735-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-99736-6

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