Ad hoc IR: not much room for improvement

Ranking function performance reached a plateau in 1994. The reason for this is investigated. First the performance of BM25 is measured as the proportion of queries satisfied on the first page of 10 results – it performs well. The performance is then compared to human performance. They perform comparably. The conclusion is there isn’t much room for ranking function improvement. Categories and Subject Descriptors H.3.3 [Information Storage and Retrieval]: Information Search and Retrieval – Search process. General Terms Measurement, Performance, Experimentation, Human Factors. Keywords Relevance Ranking, Document Retrieval.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: SIGIR
• Authors: Andrew Trotman, David Keeler
• Keywords: Information Storage And Retrieval, Information Technology, Measurement Performance, Retrieval Search, SIGIR 2011