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State-Aware Meta-Evaluation of Evaluation Metrics in Interactive Information Retrieval
Abstract
In interactive IR (IIR), users often seek to achieve different goals (e.g. exploring a new topic, finding a specific known item) at different search iterations and thus may evaluate system performances differently. Without state-aware approach, it would be extremely difficult to simulate and achieve real-time adaptive search evaluation and recommendation. To address this gap, our work identifies users' task states from interactive search sessions and meta-evaluates a series of online and offline evaluation metrics under varying states based on a user study dataset consisting of 1548 unique query segments from 450 search sessions. Our results indicate that: 1) users' individual task states can be identified and predicted from search behaviors and implicit feedback; 2) the effectiveness of mainstream evaluation measures (measured based upon their respective correlations with user satisfaction) vary significantly across task states. This study demonstrates the implicit heterogeneity in user-oriented IR evaluation and connects studies on complex search tasks with evaluation techniques. It also informs future research on the design of state-specific, adaptive user models and evaluation metrics.
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Metadata
- Authors
- Liu, J., & Yu, R.
- Affiliations
- University of Oklahoma (US)
- University of Bonn (DE)
- ORCID
- Venue
- Proceedings of the 30th ACM International Conference on Information & Knowledge Management
- Publisher
- ACM
- Published
- 2021-10-26
- Pages
- 3258-3262
- ISSN
- 2155-0751 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W3208649236
- Semantic Scholar
- d5dce4f5f3b1898d4da3304778cf0231338d0233
- Cited by
- 20
- References
- 15
- Citations by year
- 2026: 1 · 2025: 3 · 2024: 5 · 2023: 8 · 2022: 3
- FWCI
- 2.69
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM) (publishedVersion)
- Funders
- National Science Foundation (2106152)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Information Retrieval and Search Behavior
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Recommender Systems and Techniques
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Human-Computer Interaction › Usability and User Interface Design
- Keywords
- interactive information retrieval, meta-evaluation, evaluation metrics, user satisfaction, implicit feedback, search behavior, user-centered evaluation
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