Expected reading effort in focused retrieval evaluation

This study introduces a novel framework for evaluating passage and XML retrieval. The framework focuses on a user’s effort to localize relevant content in a result document. Measuring the effort is based on a system guided reading order of documents. The effort is calculated as the quantity of text the user is expected to browse through. More specifically, this study seeks evaluation metrics for retrieval methods following a specific fetch and browse approach, where in the fetch phase documents are ranked in decreasing order according to their document score, like in document retrieval. In the browse phase, for each retrieved document, a set of non-overlapping passages representing the relevant text within the document is retrieved. In other words, the passages of the document are re-organized, so that the best matching passages are read first in sequential order. We introduce an application scenario motivating the framework, and propose sample metrics based on the framework. These metrics give a basis for the comparison of effectiveness between traditional document retrieval and passage/XML retrieval and illuminate the benefit of passage/XML retrieval.