Developing Benchmarks: The Importance of the Process and New Paradigms

The value and importance of Benchmark Evaluations is widely acknowledged. Benchmarks play a key role in many research projects. It takes time, a well-balanced team of domain specialists preferably with links to the user community and industry, and a strong involvement of the research community itself to establish a sound evaluation framework that includes (annotated) data sets, well-defined tasks that reflect the needs in the 'real world', a proper evaluation methodology, ground-truth, including a strategy for repetitive assessments, and last but not least, funding. Although the benefits of an evaluation framework are typically reviewed from a perspective of 'research output' --e.g., a scientific publication demonstrating an advance of a certain methodology-- it is important to be aware of the value of the process of creating a benchmark itself: it increases significantly the understanding of the problem we want to address and as a consequence also the impact of the evaluation outcomes. In this talk I will overview the history of a series of tasks focusing on audiovisual search emphasizing its 'multimodal' aspects, starting in 2006 with the workshop on 'Searching Spontaneous Conversational Speech' that led to tasks in CLEF and MediaEval ("Search and Hyperlinking"), and recently also TRECVid ("Video Hyperlinking"). The focus of my talk will be on the process rather than on the results of these evaluations themselves, and will address cross-benchmark connections, and new benchmark paradigms, specifically the integration of benchmarking in industrial 'living labs' that are becoming popular in some domains.