A Novelty-based Evaluation Method for Information Retrieval

Abstract

In information retrieval research, precision and recall have long been used to evaluate IR systems. However, given that a number of retrieval systems resembling one another are already available to the public, it is valuable to retrieve novel relevant documents, i.e., documents that cannot be retrieved by those existing systems. In view of this problem, we propose an evaluation method that favors systems retrieving as many novel documents as possible. We also used our method to evaluate systems that participated in the IREX workshop.