Related papers: Validating Simulations of User Query Variants
Determining the veracity of atomic claims is an imperative component of many recently proposed fact-checking systems. Many approaches tackle this problem by first retrieving evidence by querying a search engine and then performing…
Evaluation of policies in recommender systems typically involves A/B testing using live experiments on real users to assess a new policy's impact on relevant metrics. This ``gold standard'' comes at a high cost, however, in terms of cycle…
Many Information Retrieval (IR) models make use of offline statistical techniques to score documents for ranking over a single period, rather than use an online, dynamic system that is responsive to users over time. In this paper, we…
Traditional recommender systems present a relatively static list of recommendations to a user where the feedback is typically limited to an accept/reject or a rating model. However, these simple modes of feedback may only provide limited…
Simulating nuanced user experiences within complex interactive search systems poses distinct challenge for traditional methodologies, which often rely on static user proxies or, more recently, on standalone large language model (LLM) agents…
This paper presents a new user feedback mechanism based on Wikipedia concepts for interactive retrieval. In this mechanism, the system presents to the user a group of Wikipedia concepts, and the user can choose those relevant to refine…
Conversational recommender systems (CRS) enhance user experience through multi-turn interactions, yet evaluating CRS remains challenging. User simulators can provide comprehensive evaluations through interactions with CRS, but building…
This study proposes a method to diversify queries in existing test collections to reflect some of the diversity of search engine users, aligning with an earlier vision of an 'ideal' test collection. A Large Language Model (LLM) is used to…
User simulation is a promising approach for automatically training and evaluating conversational information access agents, enabling the generation of synthetic dialogues and facilitating reproducible experiments at scale. However, the…
Existing Conversational Recommender Systems (CRS) predominantly utilize user simulators for training and evaluating recommendation policies. These simulators often oversimplify the complexity of user interactions by focusing solely on…
The Visual Object Information Retrieval (VOIR) system described in this paper implements an image retrieval approach that combines two layers, the conceptual and the visual layer. It uses terms from a textual thesaurus to represent the…
We address the problem of generating query suggestions to support users in completing their underlying tasks (which motivated them to search in the first place). Given an initial query, these query suggestions should provide a coverage of…
Many cluster similarity indices are used to evaluate clustering algorithms, and choosing the best one for a particular task remains an open problem. We demonstrate that this problem is crucial: there are many disagreements among the…
User-machine interaction is crucial for information retrieval, especially for spoken content retrieval, because spoken content is difficult to browse, and speech recognition has a high degree of uncertainty. In interactive retrieval, the…
Classic evaluation methods of believable agents are time-consuming because they involve many human to judge agents. They are well suited to validate work on new believable behaviours models. However, during the implementation, numerous…
With the recent advances in Reinforcement Learning (RL), there have been tremendous interests in employing RL for recommender systems. However, directly training and evaluating a new RL-based recommendation algorithm needs to collect users'…
In this work, we analyze a pseudo-relevance retrieval method based on the results of web search engines. By enriching topics with text data from web search engine result pages and linked contents, we train topic-specific and cost-efficient…
Due to the advantages in the cost-efficiency and reproducibility, user simulation has become a promising solution to the user-centric evaluation of information retrieval systems. Nonetheless, accurately simulating user search behaviors has…
Retrieving target information based on input query is of fundamental importance in many real-world applications. In practice, it is not uncommon for the initial search to fail, where additional feedback information is needed to guide the…
Human-robot collaboration enables highly adaptive co-working. The variety of resulting workflows makes it difficult to measure metrics as, e.g. makespans or idle times for multiple systems and tasks in a comparable manner. This issue can be…