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Modelling Randomness in Relevance Judgments and Evaluation Measures

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 10772))

Abstract

We propose a general stochastic approach which defines relevance as a set of binomial random variables where the expectation p of each variable indicates the quantity of relevance for each relevance grade. This represents the first step in the direction of modelling evaluation measures as a transformation of random variables, turning them into random evaluation measures. We show that a consequence of this new approach is to remove the distinction between binary and multi-graded measures and, at the same time, to deal with incomplete information, providing a single unified framework for all these different aspects. We experiment on TREC collections to show how these new random measures correlate to existing ones and which desirable properties, such as robustness to pool downsampling and discriminative power, they have.

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Correspondence to Nicola Ferro .

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Ferrante, M., Ferro, N., Pontarollo, S. (2018). Modelling Randomness in Relevance Judgments and Evaluation Measures. In: Pasi, G., Piwowarski, B., Azzopardi, L., Hanbury, A. (eds) Advances in Information Retrieval. ECIR 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10772. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76941-7_15

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76941-7_15

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-76940-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-76941-7

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