Sub-corpora Impact on System Effectiveness

Nicola Ferro, Mark Sanderson

Abstract: Understanding the factors comprising IR system effectiveness is of primary importance to compare different IR systems. Effectiveness is traditionally broken down, using ANOVA, into a topic and a system effect but this leaves out a key component of our evaluation paradigm: the collections of documents. We break down effectiveness into topic, system and sub-corpus effects and compare it to the traditional break down, considering what happens when different evaluation measures come into play. We found that sub-corpora are a significant effect. The consideration of which allows us to be more accurate in estimating what systems are significantly different. We also found that the sub-corpora affect different evaluation measures in different ways and this may impact on what systems are considered significantly different.