Evaluation of Personalised Information Retrieval at CLEF 2017 (PIR-CLEF): Towards a reproducible evaluation framework for PIR

Abstract

The Personalised Information Retrieval (PIR-CLEF) Lab workshop at CLEF 2017 is designed to provide a forum for the exploration of methodologies for the repeatable evaluation of personalised information retrieval (PIR). The PIR-CLEF 2017 Lab provides a preliminary pilot edition of a Lab task dedicated to personalised search, while the workshop at the conference is intended to provide a forum for the discussion of strategies for the evaluation of PIR and extension of the pilot Lab task. The PIR-CLEF 2017 Pilot Task is the first evaluation benchmark based on the Cranfield paradigm, with the potential benefits of producing evaluation results that are easily reproducible. The task is based on search sessions over a subset of the ClueWeb12 collection, undertaken by 10 users by using a clearly defined and novel methodology. The collection provides data gathered by the activities undertaken during the search sessions by each participant, including details of relevant documents as marked by the searchers. The PIR-CLEF 2017 workshop is intended to review the design and construction of this Pilot collection and to consider the topic of reproducible evaluation of PIR more generally with the aim of launching a more formal PIR Lab at CLEF 2018.