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What Does the User Really Want ?. Relevance, Precision and Recall. Overview. What is relevance ? Define Precision Define Recall. Basic Web Retrieval Process. Results. Need. KeywordQuery. Relevance. Good results are relevant to the need ! BUT
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What Does the User Really Want ? Relevance, Precision and Recall
Overview • What is relevance ? • Define Precision • Define Recall
Basic Web Retrieval Process Results Need KeywordQuery
Relevance • Good results are relevant to the need ! • BUT • How do we know what the user needs and wants
Three Definition of Relevance • Pages which match the user need • Expert centred • Pages which the user thinks match their need • User centred • Pages which match the user query • System centred
Expert Centred • Agree a definition of what the query means • Trawl through results identifying each page returned as relevant or irrelevant • Disadvantage • Takes no account of users current knowledge or needs • static
User Centred • Get user to trawl through pages judging them as relevant or irrelevant • Problem • If they knew the answer would they be looking ? • Can we get the same result twice ? • expensive
System Centred • Assumes keywords adequately express need • Highly reproducible • Really assessing accuracy of indexing and keyword matching
Formal evaluations • Almost always use an Expert Centred or System Centred Approach
Formal Definition of relevance A relevant page is a page which meets the user’s need and can be recognised as such by the search result description provided by the search engine by a sufficiently expert user
Precision Simply Defined The proportion of documents returned which are actually relevant to the query or need
Precision Issues • Needs to be averaged across a set of queries to be meaningful • Needs to take account of rank order in results set
Recall Simply Defined The proportion of available relevant documents (anywhere on the web) which are actually returned in the results set
Retrieved versus Relevant Docs High Recall Retrieval Retrieved Relevant High Precision Retrieval
Recall Problems • Need to find all the pages on the web relevant to the need • Theoretically get a team of experts to assess every page on the web for relevance • In practice the results of a high recall search of a fixed web trawl is assessed
Different sorts of retrieval • Today’s Sunderland result • High precision • Legal Cases • Has anyone ever been acquitted of murder and subsequently used their presence at the murder as an alibi ? • High recall
Key Points • Definition of Relevance • and its problems • Definition of Precision • Definition of Recall