Towards information retrieval evaluation with reduced and only positive judgements

Abstract

This paper proposes a document distance-based approach to automatically expand the number of available relevance judgements when those are limited and reduced to only positive judgements. This may happen, for example, when the only available judgements are extracted from a list of references in a published clinical systematic review. We show that evaluations based on these expanded relevance judgements are more reliable than those using only the initially available judgements. We also show the impact of such an evaluation approach as the number of initial judgements decreases.