Black Box Evaluation for Operational Information Retrieval Applications

The black box application evaluation methodology described in this tutorial is applicable to a broad range of operational information retrieval (IR) applications. Contrary to popular, traditional IR evaluation approaches that are limited to measure the IR system performance on a test collection, the black box evaluation methodology considers an IR application in its entirety: the underlying system, the corresponding document collection, and its configuration/application layer. A comprehensive set of quality criteria is used to estimate the user’s perception of the application. Scores are assigned as a weighted average of results from tests that evaluate individual aspects. The methodology was validated in a small evaluation campaign. An analysis of this campaign shows a correlation between the testers’ perception of the applications and the evaluation scores. Moreover, functional weaknesses of the tested IR applications can be identified and then systematically targeted.