CLAIRE: A combinatorial visual analytics system for information retrieval evaluation

Information Retrieval (IR) develops complex systems, constituted of several components, which aim at returning and optimally ranking the most relevant documents in response to user queries. In this context, experimental evaluation plays a central role, since it allows for measuring IR systems effectiveness, increasing the understanding of their functioning, and better directing the efforts for improving them. Current evaluation methodologies are limited by two major factors: (i) IR systems are evaluated as “black boxes” since it is not possible to decompose the contributions of the different components, e.g., stop lists, stemmers, and IR models; (ii) given that it is not possible to predict the effectiveness of an IR system, both academia and industry need to explore huge numbers of systems, originated by large combinatorial compositions of their components, to understand how they perform and how these components interact together. We propose a Combinatorial visuaL Analytics system for Information Retrieval Evaluation (CLAIRE) which allows for exploring and making sense of the performances of a large amount of IR systems, in order to quickly and intuitively grasp which system configurations are preferred, what are the contributions of the different components and how these components interact together. The CLAIRE system is then validated against use cases based on several test collections using a wide set of systems, generated by a combinatorial composition of several off-the-shelf components, representing the most common denominator almost always present in English IR systems. In particular, we validate the findings enabled by CLAIRE with respect to consolidated deep statistical analyses and we show that the CLAIRE system allows the generation of new insights, which were not detectable with traditional approaches.