Student or educator? Sign up with your school email and get 6 months of Pro free.
Cited by 524

The DOI matches its Crossref record.

Using statistical testing in the evaluation of retrieval experiments

Open access
Hull, David·1993·Proceedings of the 16th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval - SIGIR '93

Abstract

The standard strategies for evaluation based on precision and recall are examined and their relative advantages and disadvantages are discussed. In particular, it is suggested that relevance feedback be evaluated from the perspective of the user. A number of different statistical tests are described for determining if differences in performance between retrieval methods are significant. These tests have often been ignored in the past because most are based on an assumption of normality which is not strictly valid for the standard performance measures. However, one can test this assumption using simple diagnostic plots, and if it is a poor approximation, there are a number of non-parametric alternatives.

Overview

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1145/160688.160758

Cites

Statistics

Verification

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Citations

Cited by

See all 524

Metadata

Authors
Hull, D.
Venue
Proceedings of the 16th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval - SIGIR '93
Publisher
ACM Press
Published
1993
Pages
329-338
OpenAlex
W2015629112
Cited by
524
References
0
FWCI
5.02
Type
conference paper
Language
en
Open access
bronze

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review

How to cite

Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.

This page
CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Using statistical testing in the evaluation of retrieval experiments. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1145/160688.160758
The paper
Hull, D. (1993). Using statistical testing in the evaluation of retrieval experiments. Proceedings of the 16th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval - SIGIR '93. https://doi.org/10.1145/160688.160758

Data sources

Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.