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Learning more powerful test statistics for click-based retrieval evaluation

Published: 19 July 2010 Publication History

Abstract

Interleaving experiments are an attractive methodology for evaluating retrieval functions through implicit feedback. Designed as a blind and unbiased test for eliciting a preference between two retrieval functions, an interleaved ranking of the results of two retrieval functions is presented to the users. It is then observed whether the users click more on results from one retrieval function or the other. While it was shown that such interleaving experiments reliably identify the better of the two retrieval functions, the naive approach of counting all clicks equally leads to a suboptimal test. We present new methods for learning how to score different types of clicks so that the resulting test statistic optimizes the statistical power of the experiment. This can lead to substantial savings in the amount of data required for reaching a target confidence level. Our methods are evaluated on an operational search engine over a collection of scientific articles.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    SIGIR '10: Proceedings of the 33rd international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval
    July 2010
    944 pages
    ISBN:9781450301534
    DOI:10.1145/1835449
    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 ACM 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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    Publication History

    Published: 19 July 2010

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    Author Tags

    1. click-through data
    2. implicit feedback
    3. retrieval evaluation

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    SIGIR '10 Paper Acceptance Rate 87 of 520 submissions, 17%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 792 of 3,983 submissions, 20%

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    • (2024)Learning Metrics that Maximise Power for Accelerated A/B-TestsProceedings of the 30th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining10.1145/3637528.3671512(5183-5193)Online publication date: 25-Aug-2024
    • (2022)Debiased Balanced Interleaving at Amazon SearchProceedings of the 31st ACM International Conference on Information & Knowledge Management10.1145/3511808.3557123(2913-2922)Online publication date: 17-Oct-2022
    • (2019)Variance Reduction in Gradient Exploration for Online Learning to RankProceedings of the 42nd International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval10.1145/3331184.3331264(835-844)Online publication date: 18-Jul-2019
    • (2017)Sensitive and Scalable Online Evaluation with Theoretical GuaranteesProceedings of the 2017 ACM on Conference on Information and Knowledge Management10.1145/3132847.3132895(77-86)Online publication date: 6-Nov-2017
    • (2017)Learning Sensitive Combinations of A/B Test MetricsProceedings of the Tenth ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining10.1145/3018661.3018708(651-659)Online publication date: 2-Feb-2017
    • (2016)Online Evaluation for Information RetrievalFoundations and Trends in Information Retrieval10.1561/150000005110:1(1-117)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2016
    • (2016)Belief and truth in hypothesised behavioursArtificial Intelligence10.1016/j.artint.2016.02.004235:C(63-94)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2016
    • (2016)A Short Survey on Online and Offline Methods for Search Quality EvaluationInformation Retrieval10.1007/978-3-319-41718-9_3(38-87)Online publication date: 26-Jul-2016
    • (2015)Are you doing what i think you are doing? criticising uncertain agent modelsProceedings of the Thirty-First Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence10.5555/3020847.3020854(52-61)Online publication date: 12-Jul-2015
    • (2015)Generalized Team Draft InterleavingProceedings of the 24th ACM International on Conference on Information and Knowledge Management10.1145/2806416.2806477(773-782)Online publication date: 17-Oct-2015
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