Accurately interpreting clickthrough data as implicit feedback

This paper examines the reliability of implicit feedback generated from clickthrough data in WWW search. Analyzing the users’ decision process using eyetracking and comparing implicit feedback against manual relevance judgments, we conclude that clicks are informative but biased. While this makes the interpretation of clicks as absolute relevance judgments difficult, we show that relative preferences derived from clicks are reasonably accurate on average. Categories and Subject Descriptors H.3 [Information Storage and Retrieval]: User Studies General Terms Human Factors, Measurement, Reliability, Experimentation Keywords Implicit Feedback, Eyetracking, WWW Search, Clickthrough

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: SIGIR
• Authors: Thorsten Joachims, Laura A. Granka, Bing Pan, Helene Hembrooke, Geri Gay
• Keywords: Implicit Feedback, Relevance Judgments, SIGIR 2005, Www Search