Abstract
On the basis of a theoretical analysis of issues around populations and sampling, for both topics and documents, and parameters with which we hope to characterise the effectiveness of different systems, we propose a modification to the traditional average precision metric. This modification involves both transformation and (in the estimation of the parameter) smoothing. The modified version is shown to have certain distributional advantages, on a substantial dataset. In particular, the distribution of values of the modified metric, over topics for a given system/run, is approximately normal.
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Robertson, S. (2012). On Smoothing Average Precision. In: Baeza-Yates, R., et al. Advances in Information Retrieval. ECIR 2012. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7224. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-28997-2_14
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-28997-2_14
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