Effect of Prevalence on Relevance Assessing Behaviour
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Date
2011-08-29T16:10:18Z
Authors
Jethani, Chandra Prakash
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
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Publisher
University of Waterloo
Abstract
Relevance assessing is an important part of information retrieval (IR) evaluation in addition to being something that all users of IR systems must do as part of their search for relevant documents. In this thesis, we present a user study conducted to understand the relevance judging behaviour of assessors when the prevalence of relevant documents in a set of documents to be judged is varied. In our user study, we collected judgements of participants on document sets of three different prevalence levels. The prevalence levels that we used were low (0.1), balanced (0.5) and high (0.9). We found that participants who judged documents at the 0.9 level made the most mistakes, and participants who judged documents at the 0.5 level made the least mistakes. We did not find a statistically significant difference in judging quality between 0.1 and 0.5 prevalence levels.
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Keywords
information retrieval, user behaviour, prevalence, human performance, user studies, human factors, precision