Skip to main content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.

Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( ) or https:// means you’ve safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

The Philosophy of Information Retrieval Evaluation

Published

Author(s)

Ellen M. Voorhees

Abstract

Evaluation conferences such as TREC, CLEF, and NTCIR are modern examples of the Cranfield evaluation paradigm. In the Cranfield paradigm, researchers perform experiments on test collections to compare the relative effectiveness of different retrieval approaches. The test collections allow the researchers to control the effects of different system parameters, increasing the power and decreasing the cost of retrieval experiments as compared to user-based evaluations. This paper reviews the fundamental assumptions and appropriate uses of the Cranfield paradigm, especially as they apply in the context of the evaluation conferences.
Proceedings Title
Proceedings of the 2001 Cross-Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF) and Springer's Lecture Notes
Conference Location
CA

Citation

Voorhees, E. (2001), The Philosophy of Information Retrieval Evaluation, Proceedings of the 2001 Cross-Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF) and Springer's Lecture Notes, CA, [online], https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=51060 (Accessed October 14, 2024)

Issues

If you have any questions about this publication or are having problems accessing it, please contact reflib@nist.gov.

Created September 24, 2001, Updated February 17, 2017