There have been a number of developments over the past months around our living labs for IR evaluation efforts.
We had a very successful challenge workshop in Amsterdam in June, thanks to the support we received from ELIAS, ESF, and ILPS. The scientific report summarizing the event is available online.
There are many challenges associated with operationalizing a living labs benchmarking campaign. Chief of these are incorporating results from experimental search systems into live production systems, and obtaining sufficiently many impressions from relatively low traffic sites. We propose that frequent (head) queries can be used to generate result lists offline, which are then interleaved with results of the production system for live evaluation. The choice of head queries is critical because (1) it removes a harsh requirement of providing rankings in real-time for query requests and (2) it ensures that experimental systems receive enough impressions, on the same set of queries, for a meaningful comparison. This idea is described in detail in an upcoming CIKM’14 short paper: Head First: Living Labs for Ad-hoc Search Evaluation.
A sad, but newsworthy development was that our CIKM’14 workshop got cancelled. It was our plan to organize a living labs challenge as part of the workshop. That challenge cannot be run as originally planned. Now we have something much better.
Living Labs for IR Evaluation (LL4IR) will run as a Lab at CLEF 2015 along the tagline “Give us your ranking, we’ll have it clicked!” The first edition of the lab will focus on three specific use-cases: (1) product search (on an e-commerce site), (2) local domain search (on a university’s website), (3) web search (through a commercial web search engine). See futher details here.