Walid Magdy and Dr. Gareth J. F. Jones, both of the Dublin City University School of Computing, will present a paper entitled Examining the Robustness of Evaluation Metrics for Patent Retrieval with Incomplete Relevance Judgements, at CLEF 2010: The Conference on Multilingual and Multimodal Information Access Evaluation, to be held 20-23 September 2010 in Padua, Italy. Here is the abstract:
Recent years have seen a growing interest in research into patent retrieval. One of the key issues in conducting information retrieval (IR) research is meaningful evaluation of the effectiveness of the retrieval techniques applied to task under investigation. Unlike many existing well explored IR tasks where the focus is on achieving high retrieval precision, patent retrieval is to a significant degree a recall focused task. The standard evaluation metric used for patent retrieval evaluation tasks is currently mean average precision (MAP). However this does not reflect system recall well. Meanwhile, the alternative of using the standard recall measure does not reflect user search effort, which is a significant factor in practical patent search environments. In recent work we introduce a novel evaluation metric for patent retrieval evaluation (PRES) (Magdy and Jones, SIGIR 2010). This is designed to reflect both system recall and user effort. Analysis of PRES demonstrated its greater effectiveness in evaluating recall-oriented applications than standard MAP and Recall. One dimension of the evaluation of patent retrieval which has not previously been studied is the effect on reliability of the evaluation metrics when relevance judgements are incomplete. We provide a study comparing the behaviour of PRES against the standard MAP and Recall metrics for varying incomplete judgements in patent retrieval. Experiments carried out using runs from the CLEF-IP 2009 datasets show that PRES and Recall are more robust than MAP for incomplete relevance sets for this task with a small preference to PRES as the most robust evaluation metric for patent retrieval with respect to the completeness of the relevance set.
For the full text of the paper, please contact the authors.
Thanks to the authors for providing the abstract.
Tags: CLEF, CLEF 2010, Conference on Multilingual and Multimodal Information Access Evaluation, Evaluation of legal information retrieval, Evaluation of patent information retrieval, Evaluation of patent information systems, Gareth J. F. Jones, Legal information retrieval, Patent information retrieval, Patent information systems, Patent law information systems, Walid Magdy
