Clarity re-visited

We present a novel interpretation of Clarity [5], a widely used query performance predictor. While Clarity is commonly described as a measure of the “distance” between the language model of the top-retrieved documents and that of the collection, we show that it actually quantifies an additional property of the result list, namely, its diversity. This analysis, along with empirical evaluation, helps to explain the low prediction quality of Clarity for large-scale Web collections. Categories and Subject Descriptors: H.3.3 [Information Search and Retrieval]: Retrieval models General Terms: Algorithms, Experimentation

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2012
• Where: SIGIR
• Authors: Shay Hummel, Anna Shtok, Fiana Raiber, Oren Kurland, David Carmel
• Keywords: Collections Categories, Information Technology, Performance Predictor, SIGIR 2012, Web Collections