On caption bias in interleaving experiments
Katja Hofmann, Fritz Behr, Filip Radlinski · 2012
Information retrieval evaluation most often involves manually assessing the relevance of particular query-document pairs. In cases where this is difficult (such as personalized search), interleaved comparison methods are becoming increasingly common. These methods compare pairs of ranking functions based on user clicks on search results, thus better reflecting true user preferences. However, by depending on clicks, there is a potential for bias. For example, users have been previously shown to be more likely to click on results with attractive titles and snippets. An interleaving evaluation where one ranker tends to generate results that attract more clicks (without being more relevant) may thus be biased.