Title
Active evaluation of ranking functions based on graded relevance
Abstract
Evaluating the quality of ranking functions is a core task in web search and other information retrieval domains. Because query distributions and item relevance change over time, ranking models often cannot be evaluated accurately on held-out training data. Instead, considerable effort is spent on manually labeling the relevance of query results for test queries in order to track ranking performance. We address the problem of estimating ranking performance as accurately as possible on a fixed labeling budget. Estimates are based on a set of most informative test queries selected by an active sampling distribution. Query labeling costs depend on the number of result items as well as item-specific attributes such as document length. We derive cost-optimal sampling distributions for the commonly used performance measures Discounted Cumulative Gain (DCG) and Expected Reciprocal Rank (ERR). Experiments on web search engine data illustrate significant reductions in labeling costs.
Year
DOI
Venue
2013
10.1007/s10994-013-5372-5
Machine Learning
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Information retrieval,Ranking,Active evaluation
Journal
92
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
1
0885-6125
2
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.39
20
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Christoph Sawade1556.21
Steffen Bickel284858.84
Timo Von Oertzen3717.84
Tobias Scheffer41862139.64
Niels Landwehr550631.54