Evaluating Risk-Sensitive Text Retrieval

Search engines with a loyal user-base face the difficult task of improving overall effectiveness while maintaining the quality of existing work-flows. Risk-sensitive evaluation tools are designed to address that task, but, they currently do not support inference over multiple baselines. Our research objectives are to: 1) Survey and revisit risk evaluation, taking into account frequentist and Bayesian inference approaches for comparing against multiple baselines; 2) Apply that new approach, evaluating a novel web search technique that leverages previously run queries to improve the effectiveness of a new user query; and 3) Explore how risk-sensitive component interactions affect end-to-end effectiveness in a search pipeline.