Augmented Test Collections: A Step in the Right Direction

In this position paper we argue that certain aspects of relevance assessment in the evaluation of IR systems are oversimplified and that human assessments represented by qrels should be augmented to take account of contextual factors and the subjectivity of the task at hand. We propose enhancing test collections used in evaluation with information related to human assessors and their interpretation of the task. Such augmented collections would provide a more realistic and user-focused evaluation, enabling us to better understand the evaluation process, the performance of systems and user interactions. A first step is to conduct user studies to examine in more detail what people actually do when we ask them to judge the relevance of a document.