Reproducibility and simulation of interactive retrieval experiments (RESIRE)

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Norbert Fuhr; Professor Dr. Philipp Schaer
• Subject Area: Data Management, Data-Intensive Systems, Computer Science Methods in Business Informatics
• Term: since 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 509543643

Although reproducibility of experiments is a topic with increasing importance in information retrieval (IR), there has been hardly any work on reproducing interactive IR experiments. The main idea of our proposed project is to describe actual users by quantitative modeling of their behavior and their content-related decisions during retrieval sessions. These model parameters can then form the basis for comparing two interactive IR experiments with regard to reproducibility, and can also be used for simulating interactive IR, e. g. for evaluating new systems or system variants without (or before) carrying out actual user experiments. As part of the proposed project, we will define a new framework model for reproducibility of interactive IR experiments, develop new metrics for reproducibility and session quality, design new simulation methods integrating behavior and content-related decisions, develop an open source framework for reproduction and simulation of interactive IR, and perform extensive experiments using existing IR log data as well as observation data from new user experiments.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants