ICTIR Tutorial: Modern Query Performance Prediction: Theory and Practice

Query performance prediction (QPP) is a core information retrieval (IR) task whose primary goal is to assess retrieval quality in the absence of relevance judgments. Applications of QPP are numerous, and include, among others, automatic query reformulation, fusion and ranker selection, distributed search and content analysis. The main objective of this tutorial is to introduce recent advances in the sub-research area of QPP in IR, covering both theory and applications. On the theoretical side, we will introduce modern QPP frameworks, which have advanced our understanding of the core QPP task. On the application side, the tutorial will set the connection between QPP theory and its usage in various modern IR applications, discussing the pros and cons, limitations, challenges and open research questions.