The Evolution of Cranfield

Published

August 14, 2019

Author(s)

Ellen Voorhees

Abstract

This chapter examines how the test collection paradigm, the dominant evaluation methodology in information retrieval, has been adapted to meet the changing requirements for information retrieval research in the era of community evaluation conferences such as TREC. Despite fierce criticism from the start and periodic pronouncements of its impending demise, the paradigm has enabled research that has greatly improved retrieval performance in practice. This success has largely resulted because of the paradigm's limitations rather than despite them. The document ranking task is a carefully calibrated level of abstraction that has sufficient fidelity to real user tasks to be informative, but is sufficiently abstract to be broadly applicable, feasible to implement, and comparatively inexpensive.

Citation

CLEF@20 - Information Retrieval Evaluation in a Changing World: Lessons Learned from 20 Years of CLEF

Publisher Info

Springer-Verlag, Berlin,

Pub Type

Book Chapters

Download Paper

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22948-1_2

Local Download

Keywords

evaluation, information retrieval, search engines, TREC

Citation

Voorhees, E. (2019), The Evolution of Cranfield, CLEF@20 - Information Retrieval Evaluation in a Changing World: Lessons Learned from 20 Years of CLEF, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, , [online], https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22948-1_2, https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=926510 (Accessed October 13, 2025)