INEX 2007 evaluation measures

This paper describes the official measures of retrieval effectiveness that are employed for the Ad Hoc Track at INEX 2007. Whereas in earlier years all, but only, XML elements could be retrieved, the result format has been liberalized to arbitrary passages. In response, the INEX 2007 measures are based on the amount of highlighted text retrieved, leading to natural extensions of the well-established measures of precision and recall. The following measures are defined: The Focused Task is evaluated by interpolated precision at 1% recall (iP[0.01]) in terms of the highlighted text retrieved. The Relevant in Context Task is evaluated by mean average generalized precision (MAgP) where the generalized score per article is based on the retrieved highlighted text. The Best in Context Task is also evaluated by mean average generalized precision (MAgP) but here the generalized score per article is based on the distance to the assessor’s best-entry point.