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Query-specific Variable Depth Pooling via Query Performance Prediction

Published: 18 July 2023 Publication History

Abstract

Due to the massive size of test collections, a standard practice in IR evaluation is to construct a 'pool' of candidate relevant documents comprised of the top-k documents retrieved by a wide range of different retrieval systems - a process called depth-k pooling. A standard practice is to set the depth (k) to a constant value for each query constituting the benchmark set. However, in this paper we argue that the annotation effort can be substantially reduced if the depth of the pool is made a variable quantity for each query, the rationale being that the number of documents relevant to the information need can widely vary across queries. Our hypothesis is that a lower depth for queries with a small number of relevant documents, and a higher depth for those with a larger number of relevant documents can potentially reduce the annotation effort without a significant change in IR effectiveness evaluation.We make use of standard query performance prediction (QPP) techniques to estimate the number of potentially relevant documents for each query, which is then used to determine the depth of the pool. Our experiments conducted on standard test collections demonstrate that this proposed method of employing query-specific variable depths is able to adequately reflect the relative effectiveness of IR systems with a substantially smaller annotation effort.

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            cover image ACM Conferences
            SIGIR '23: Proceedings of the 46th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval
            July 2023
            3567 pages
            ISBN:9781450394086
            DOI:10.1145/3539618
            Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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            Published: 18 July 2023

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            Author Tags

            1. IR model evaluation
            2. depth pooling
            3. query performance prediction

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            Overall Acceptance Rate 792 of 3,983 submissions, 20%

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            View all
            • (2025)A contrastive neural disentanglement approach for query performance predictionMachine Learning10.1007/s10994-025-06752-x114:4Online publication date: 25-Feb-2025
            • (2025)Robust query performance prediction for dense retrievers via adaptive disturbance generationMachine Learning10.1007/s10994-024-06659-z114:3Online publication date: 6-Feb-2025
            • (2024)Query Performance Prediction: Techniques and Applications in Modern Information RetrievalProceedings of the 2024 Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval in the Asia Pacific Region10.1145/3673791.3698438(291-294)Online publication date: 8-Dec-2024
            • (2024)"In-Context Learning" or: How I learned to stop worrying and love "Applied Information Retrieval"Proceedings of the 47th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval10.1145/3626772.3657842(14-25)Online publication date: 10-Jul-2024
            • (2024)Query Performance Prediction: From Fundamentals to Advanced TechniquesAdvances in Information Retrieval10.1007/978-3-031-56069-9_51(381-388)Online publication date: 24-Mar-2024

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