Information Retrieval Evaluation

http://net.pku.edu.cn/~wbia 黄连恩 [email protected]

北京大学信息工程学院 10/21/2014

IR Evaluation Methodology

Measures for a search engine

   创建 index 的速度  Number of documents/hour  Documents size These criteria measurable.

但更关键的 measure 是 user happiness 怎样量化地度量它 ？ 搜索的速度   响应时间： Latency as a function of index size 吞吐率： Throughput as a function of index size 查询语言的表达能力   Ability to express complex information needs Speed on complex queries 3

Measuring user happiness

    Issue: 谁是 user? Web engine : user finds what they want and return to the engine  Can measure rate of return users eCommerce site : user finds what they want and make a purchase   Is it the end-user, or the eCommerce site, whose happiness we measure?

Measure time to purchase, or fraction of searchers who become buyers?

Enterprise (company/govt/academic): Care about “ user productivity ”   How much time do my users save when looking for information?

Many other criteria having to do with breadth of access, secure access, etc.

4

Happiness: elusive to measure

   Commonest proxy: relevance of search results But how do you measure relevance?

Methodology: test collection(corpus) 1.

A benchmark document collection 2.

3.

A benchmark suite of queries A binary assessment of either Relevant or Irrelevant for each query-doc pair  Some work on more-than-binary, but not the standard 5

Evaluating an IR system

  Note: the

information need query,

Relevance is assessed relative to the

information need

not is translated into a the query E.g.,   Information need : I'm looking for information on whether drinking red wine is more effective at reducing your risk of heart attacks than white wine.

Query :

wine red white heart attack effective

 You evaluate whether the doc addresses the information need, not whether it has those words 6

Evaluation Corpus

• • TREC - National Institute of Standards and Testing (NIST) has run a large IR test bed for many years Test collections consisting of documents , queries , and relevance judgments , e.g., – CACM : Titles and abstracts from the Communications of the ACM from 1958-1979. Queries and relevance judgments generated by computer scientists.

– AP : Associated Press newswire documents from 1988-1990 (from TREC disks 1-3). Queries are the title fields from TREC topics 51-150. Topics and relevance judgments generated by government information analysts.

– GOV2 : Web pages crawled from websites in the .gov domain during early 2004. Queries are the title fields from TREC topics 701-850. Topics and relevance judgments generated by government analysts.

7/N

Test Collections

8/N

TREC Topic Example

9/N

Relevance Judgments

• •

Obtaining relevance judgments is an expensive, time-consuming process

–

who does it?

–

what are the instructions?

–

what is the level of agreement?

TREC judgments

–

depend on task being evaluated

–

generally binary

–

agreement good because of “narrative”

10/N

Pooling

• • •

Exhaustive judgments for all documents in a collection is not practical Pooling

–

technique is used in TREC top k results (for TREC, k varied between 50 and 200) from the rankings obtained by different search engines (or retrieval algorithms) are merged into a pool

–

duplicates are removed

–

documents are presented in some random order to the relevance judges Produces a large number of relevance judgments for each query, although still incomplete

11/N

IR Evaluation Metrics

Unranked retrieval evaluation: Precision and Recall

 

Precision

: 检索得到的文档中相关的比率 P(relevant|retrieved)

Recall

: 相关文档被检索出来的比率 P(retrieved|relevant) = = Retrieved Not Retrieved Relevant tp fn Not Relevant fp tn   精度 Precision P = tp/(tp + fp) 召回率 Recall R = tp/(tp + fn) 13

Accuracy

    给定一个 Query ，搜索引擎对每个文档分类 classifies as “ Relevant ” or “ Irrelevant ” .

Accuracy of an engine: 分类的正确比率 .

Accuracy = (tp + tn)/(tp + fp +tn + fn) Is this a very useful evaluation measure in IR?

Retrieved Not Retrieved Relevant Not Relevant tp fp fn tn 14

Why not just use accuracy?

 How to build a 99.9999% accurate search engine on a low budget … .

Search for:

0 matching results found.

 People doing information retrieval something want to find and have a certain tolerance for junk.

15

Precision and recall when ranked    把集合上的定 义扩展到 ranked list 在 ranked list 中每个文档 处，计算 P/R point 这样计算出来的值，那些是有用的？    Consider a P/R point for each relevant document Consider value only at fixed rank cutoffs  e.g., precision at rank 20 Consider value only at fixed recall points   e.g., precision at 20% recall May be more than one precision value at a recall point 16

Precision and Recall example 17

Average

precision of a query    Often want a single-number effectiveness measure Average precision is widely used in IR Calculate by averaging precision when recall increases 18

Recall/precision graphs   Average precision .vs. P/R graph  AP hides information  Recall/precision graph has odd saw-shape if done directly 但是 P/R 图很难比较  19

Precision and Recall, toward averaging 20

Averaging graphs: a false start    How can graphs be averaged ?

 不同的 queries 有不同的 recall values What is precision at 25% recall?

 插 值 interpolate  How?

21

Interpolation of graphs   可能的插 值方法   No interpolation  Not very useful Connect the dots  Not a function    Connect max Connect min Connect average  … 0%recall 怎么 处理 ?

   Assume 0?

Assume best?

Constant start?

22

How to choose?

   一个好的 检索系统具有这样的特点：一般来说（ On average ），随着 recall 增加 , 它的 precision 会降低   Verified time and time again On average  插 值，使得 makes function monotonically decreasing 比如 : 从左往右，取右 边最大 precisions 值为插值   where S is the set of observed (R,P) points 结果是一个 step function 23

Our example, interpolated this way   monotonically decreasing Handles 0% recall smoothly 24

Averaging graphs: using interpolation   Asked: what is precision at 25% recall?

Interpolate values 25

Averaging

across

queries  多个 queries 间的平均  微平均 Micro-average 点，用来 计算平均  – 每个 relevant document 是一个 宏平均 算平均    Macro-average – 每个 query 是一个点，用来 计 Average of many queries’ average precision values Called mean average precision ( MAP ) “Average average precision” sounds weird Most common 26

Interpolated

average precision   Average precision at standard recall points    For a given query, compute P/R point for every relevant doc doc.

Interpolate precision at standard recall levels   11-pt 3-pt is usually 100%, 90, 80, …, 10, 0% (yes, 0% recall) is usually 75%, 50%, 25% Average over all queries to get average precision at each recall level Average interpolated recall levels to get single result  Called “interpolated average precision”  Not used much anymore; common MAP “mean average precision” more  Values at specific interpolated points still commonly used 27

Interpolation and averaging 28

A combined measure:

F

 P/R 的综合指标 F measure ( weighted mean ):

F

  1

P

1 ( 1  

R

 (   2 2 

P

1 )

PR R

 通常使用 balanced F 1 measure(  harmonic = 1 or  = ½ )  Harmonic mean is a conservative average ， Heavily penalizes low values of P or R 29

Averaging F, example     Q-bad has 1 relevant document   Retrieved at rank 1000 (R P) = (1, 0.001)  F value of 0.2%, so AvgF = 0.2% Q-perfect has 10 relevant documents  Retrieved at ranks 1-10   (R,P) = (.1,1), (.2,1), …, (1,1) F values of 18%, 33%, …, 100%, so AvgF = 66.2% Macro average  ( 0.2% + 66.2%) Micro average  ( 0.2% + 18% / 2 = 33.2% + … 100%) / 11 = 60.2% 30

Focusing on Top Documents

• • •

Users tend to look at only the top part of the ranked result list to find relevant documents Some search tasks have only one relevant document

–

e.g., navigational search , question answering Recall not appropriate

–

instead need to measure how well the search engine does at retrieving relevant documents at very high ranks

31/N

Focusing on Top Documents

• • •

Precision at N Precision at Rank R

–

R typically 5, 10, 20

–

easy to compute, average, understand

–

not sensitive to rank positions less than R Reciprocal Rank

–

reciprocal of the rank at which the first relevant document is retrieved

–

Mean Reciprocal Rank (MRR)

is the average of the reciprocal ranks over a set of queries

–

Discounted Cumulative Gain

• •

Popular measure for evaluating web search and related tasks Two assumptions :

–

Highly relevant documents are more useful than marginally relevant document

–

the lower the ranked position of a relevant document, the less useful it is for the user,

•

since it is less likely to be examined

33/N

Discounted Cumulative Gain

• • •

Uses

graded relevance

usefulness, or gain, from examining a document as a measure of the Gain is accumulated starting at the top of the ranking and may be reduced, or discounted, at lower ranks Typical discount is 1/log (rank)

–

With base 2, the discount at rank 4 is 1/2, and at rank 8 it is 1/3

34/N

Discounted Cumulative Gain

•

DCG is the total gain accumulated at a particular rank p:

•

Alternative formulation:

–

used by some web search companies

–

emphasis on retrieving highly relevant documents

35/N

DCG Example

• • •

10 ranked documents judged on 0-3 relevance scale: 3, 2, 3, 0, 0, 1, 2, 2, 3, 0 discounted gain: 3, 2/1, 3/1.59, 0, 0, 1/2.59, 2/2.81, 2/3, 3/3.17, 0 = 3, 2, 1.89, 0, 0, 0.39, 0.71, 0.67, 0.95, 0 DCG: 3, 5, 6.89, 6.89, 6.89, 7.28, 7.99, 8.66, 9.61, 9.61

36/N

Normalized DCG

•

DCG values are often

normalized

by comparing the DCG at each rank with the DCG value for the

perfect ranking

–

makes averaging easier for queries with different numbers of relevant documents

37/N

NDCG Example

• • •

Perfect ranking: 3, 3, 3, 2, 2, 2, 1, 0, 0, 0 ideal DCG values: 3, 6, 7.89, 8.89, 9.75, 10.52, 10.88, 10.88, 10.88, 10 NDCG values (divide actual by ideal): 1, 0.83, 0.87, 0.76, 0.71, 0.69, 0.73, 0.8, 0.88, 0.88

–

NDCG



1 at any rank position

38/N

Using Preferences

•

Two rankings described using preferences can be compared using the

Kendall tau coefficient (τ ) :

• –

P is the number of preferences that agree and Q is the number that disagree For preferences derived from binary relevance judgments, can use

BPREF

39/N

Testing and Statistics

Significance Tests

• •

Given the results from a number of queries, how can we conclude that ranking algorithm A is better than algorithm B?

A significance test enables us to reject the

null hypothesis

(no difference) in favor of the alternative hypothesis (B is better than A)

–

the

power

of a test is the probability that the test will reject the null hypothesis correctly

–

increasing the number of queries in the experiment also increases power of test

41/N

One-Sided Test

•

Distribution for the possible values of a test statistic assuming the null hypothesis

•

shaded area is region of rejection

42/N

Example Experimental Results

43/N

t-Test

• • •

Assumption is that the difference between the effectiveness values is a sample from a normal distribution Null hypothesis is that the mean of the distribution of differences is zero Test statistic

–

for the example,

44/N

Sign Test

• • • •

Ignores magnitude of differences Null hypothesis for this test is that

–

P(B > A) = P(A > B) = ½

–

number of pairs where B is “better” than A would be the same as the number of pairs where A is “better” than B Test statistic is number of pairs where B>A For example data,

–

test statistic is 7, p-value = 0.17

–

cannot reject null hypothesis

45/N

Online Testing

• • • •

Test (or even train) using live traffic on a search engine Benefits:

–

real users, less biased, large amounts of test data Drawbacks:

–

noisy data, can degrade user experience Often done on small proportion (1-5%) of live traffic

46/N

本次

课小结

 IR evaluation       Precision , Recall , F Interpolation MAP , interpolated AP P@N,P@R DCG,NDCG BPREF 47

Thank You!

Q&A

阅读材料

  [1] IIR Ch1,Ch6.2,Ch6.3,Ch8.1,8.2,8.3,8.4

[2] M. P. Jay and W. B. Croft, "A language modeling approach to information retrieval," in Proceedings of the 21st annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval . Melbourne, Australia: ACM Press, 1998.

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       习题 8-9 [**] 在 10,000 篇文档构成的文档集中， 某个 查询的相关文档总数为 8 ，下面 给出了某系统 针对该查询的前 20 个有序 结果的相关 ( 用 R 表示 ) 和 不相关 ( 用 N 表示 ) 情况，其中有 6 篇相关文档： RRNNN NNNRN RNNNR NNNNR a. 前 20 篇文档的正确率是多少？ b. 前 20 篇文档的 F1 值是多少 ?

c. 在 25% 召回率水平上的插 值正确率是多少？ d. 在 33% 召回率水平上的插 值正确率是多少？ e. 计算其 MAP 值。

#2. Evaluation    定 义 precision-recall graph 如下： 对一个查询结果 列表，每一个返回 结果文档处计算 precision/recall 点，由 这些点构成的图 . 在 这个图上定义 breakeven point recall 值相等的点 . 为 precision 和 问 ：存在多于一个 breakeven point 的 图吗？如果 有， 给出例子；没有的话，请证明之。