Robustness of well‐designed retrieval performance measures under optimal user behavior
John R. Conlon, Sumali J. Conlon · Journal of the American Society for Information Science · 1998
This article considers a simple model of an information retrieval (IR) technology, and uses this model to examine performance measures for IR systems. In particular, we show that, if a user is employing an IR system optimally, then reasonable performance measures will tend to be relatively robust, or insensitive, to small variations in assumptions about the user's behavior. A simple empirical illustration of this approach is reported, though more work will be needed to determine exactly how robust performance measures will be in practical applications.