Practical online retrieval evaluation

Abstract

Online evaluation is amongst the few evaluation techniques available to the information retrieval community that is guaranteed to reflect how users actually respond to improvements developed by the community. Broadly speaking, online evaluation refers to any evaluation of retrieval quality conducted while observing user behavior in a natural context. However, it is rarely employed outside of large commercial search engines due primarily to a perception that it is impractical at small scales. The goal of this tutorial is to familiarize information retrieval researchers with state-of-the-art techniques in evaluating information retrieval systems based on natural user clicking behavior, as well as to show how such methods can be practically deployed. In particular, our focus will be on demonstrating how the Interleaving approach and other click based techniques contrast with traditional offline evaluation, and how these online methods can be effectively used in academic-scale research. In addition to lecture notes, we will also provide sample software and code walk-throughs to showcase the ease with which Interleaving and other click-based methods can be employed by students, academics and other researchers.