We present a standardized evaluation framework for each of the three tasks and discuss the evaluation results of the altogether 58 submitted contributions. For the first time, instead of accepting the output of software runs, we collected the softwares themselves and run them on a computer cluster at our site. As evaluation and experimentation platform we use TIRA, which is being developed at the Webis Group in Weimar. TIRA can handle large-scale software submissions by means of virtualization, sandboxed execution, tailored unit testing, and staged submission. In addition to the achieved evaluation results, a major achievement of our lab is that we now have the largest collection of state-of-the-art approaches with regard to the mentioned tasks for further analysis at our disposal.
In this report, we summarize the outcome of the "Evaluation-as-a-Service" workshop that was held on the 5th and 6th March 2015 in Sierre, Switzerland. The objective of the meeting was to bring together initiatives that use cloud infrastructures, virtual machines, APIs (Application Programming Interface) and related projects that provide evaluation of information retrieval or machine learning tools as a service.
Evaluation in empirical computer science is essential to show progress and assess technologies developed. Several research domains such as information retrieval have long relied on systematic evaluation to measure progress: here, the Cranfield paradigm of creating shared test collections, defining search tasks, and collecting ground truth for these tasks has persisted up until now. In recent years, however, several new challenges have emerged that do not fit this paradigm very well: extremely large data sets, confidential data sets as found in the medical domain, and rapidly changing data sets as often encountered in industry. Also, crowdsourcing has changed the way that industry approaches problem-solving with companies now organizing challenges and handing out monetary awards to incentivize people to work on their challenges, particularly in the field of machine learning. This paper is based on discussions at a workshop on Evaluation-as-a-Service (EaaS). EaaS is the paradigm of not providing data sets to participants and have them work on the data locally, but keeping the data central and allowing access via Application Programming Interfaces (API), Virtual Machines (VM) or other possibilities to ship executables. The objectives of this paper are to summarize and compare the current approaches and consolidate the experiences of these approaches to outline the next steps of EaaS, particularly towards sustainable research infrastructures. The paper summarizes several existing approaches to EaaS and analyzes their usage scenarios and also the advantages and disadvantages. The many factors influencing EaaS are overviewed, and the environment in terms of motivations for the various stakeholders, from funding agencies to challenge organizers, researchers and participants, to industry interested in supplying real-world problems for which they require solutions.
Document clustering offers the potential of supporting users in interactive retrieval, especially when users have problems in specifying their information need precisely. In this paper, we present a theoretic foundation for optimum document clustering. Key idea is to base cluster analysis and evalutation on a set of queries, by defining documents as being similar if they are relevant to the same queries. Three components are essential within our optimum clustering framework, OCF: (1) a set of queries, (2) a probabilistic retrieval method, and (3) a document similarity metric. After introducing an appropriate validity measure, we define optimum clustering with respect to the estimates of the relevance probability for the query-document pairs under consideration. Moreover, we show that well-known clustering methods are implicitly based on the three components, but that they use heuristic design decisions for some of them. We argue that with our framework more targeted research for developing better document clustering methods becomes possible. Experimental results demonstrate the potential of our considerations.
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