Title
Evaluating Web Search with a Bejeweled Player Model
Abstract
The design of a Web search evaluation metric is closely related with how the user's interaction process is modeled. Each behavioral model results in a different metric used to evaluate search performance. In these models and the user behavior assumptions behind them, when a user ends a search session is one of the prime concerns because it is highly related to both benefit and cost estimation. Existing metric design usually adopts some simplified criteria to decide the stopping time point: (1) upper limit for benefit (e.g. RR, AP); (2) upper limit for cost (e.g. Precision@N, DCG@N). However, in many practical search sessions (e.g. exploratory search), the stopping criterion is more complex than the simplified case. Analyzing benefit and cost of actual users' search sessions, we find that the stopping criteria vary with search tasks and are usually combination effects of both benefit and cost factors. Inspired by a popular computer game named Bejeweled, we propose a Bejeweled Player Model (BPM) to simulate users' search interaction processes and evaluate their search performances. In the BPM, a user stops when he/she either has found sufficient useful information or has no more patience to continue. Given this assumption, a new evaluation framework based on upper limits (either fixed or changeable as search proceeds) for both benefit and cost is proposed. We show how to derive a new metric from the framework and demonstrate that it can be adopted to revise traditional metrics like Discounted Cumulative Gain (DCG), Expected Reciprocal Rank (ERR) and Average Precision (AP). To show effectiveness of the proposed framework, we compare it with a number of existing metrics in terms of correlation between user satisfaction and the metrics based on a dataset that collects users' explicit satisfaction feedbacks and assessors' relevance judgements. Experiment results show that the framework is better correlated with user satisfaction feedbacks.
Year
DOI
Venue
2017
10.1145/3077136.3080841
SIGIR
Keywords
Field
DocType
Benefit and Cost, Evaluation Metrics, User Model
Prime (order theory),Data mining,Computer science,Behavioral modeling,Cost estimate,User modeling,Artificial intelligence,Factor cost,Stopping time,Exploratory search,Machine learning,Discounted cumulative gain
Conference
ISBN
Citations 
PageRank 
978-1-4503-5022-8
9
0.50
References 
Authors
30
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Fan Zhang190.50
Yiqun Liu21592136.51
Xin Li3233.18
Min Zhang41658134.93
Yinghui Xu517220.23
Shaoping Ma61544126.00