Do Subtopic Judgments Reflect Diversity?

John A. Akinyemi, Charles L. A. Clarke

Abstract: Current measures of novelty and diversity in information retrieval evaluation require explicit subtopic judgments, adding complexity to the manual assessment process. In some sense, these subtopic judgments may be viewed as providing a crude indication of document similarity, since we might expect documents relevant to common subtopics to be more similar on average than documents sharing no common subtopic, even when these documents are relevant to the same overall topic. In this paper, we test this hypothesis using documents and judgments drawn from the TREC 2009 Web Track. Our experiments demonstrate that higher subtopic overlap correlates with higher cosine similarity, providing validation for the use of subtopic judgments and pointing to new possibilities for measuring of novelty and diversity.