Tetsuya Sakai

Covering aspects from principles and limitations of statistical significance tests to topic set size design and power analysis, this book guides readers to statistically well-designed experiments. Although classical statistical significance tests are to some extent useful in information retrieval (IR) evaluation, they can harm research unless they are used appropriately with the right sample sizes and statistical power and unless the test results are reported properly. The first half of the book is mainly targeted at undergraduate students, and the second half is suitable for graduate students and researchers who regularly conduct laboratory experiments in IR, natural language processing, recommendations, and related fields. Chapters 1–5 review parametric significance tests for comparing system means, namely, t-tests and ANOVAs, and show how easily they can be conducted using Microsoft Excel or R. These chapters also discuss a few multiple comparison procedures for researchers who are interested in comparing every system pair, including a randomised version of Tukey's Honestly Significant Difference test. The chapters then deal with known limitations of classical significance testing and provide practical guidelines for reporting research results regarding comparison of means. Chapters 6 and 7 discuss statistical power. Chapter 6 introduces topic set size design to enable test collection builders to determine an appropriate number of topics to create. Readers can easily use the author’s Excel tools for topic set size design based on the paired and two-sample t-tests, one-way ANOVA, and confidence intervals. Chapter 7 describes power-analysis-based methods for determining an appropriate sample size for a new experiment based on a similar experiment done in the past, detailing how to utilize the author’s R tools for power analysis and how to interpret the results. Case studies from IR for both Excel-based topic set size design and R-based power analysis are also provided.

Sample Sizes, Effect Sizes, and Statistical Power

Laboratory Experiments in Information Retrieval

Shunsuke Inenaga

Kunihiko Sadakane

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 23rd International Symposium on String Processing and Information Retrieval, SPIRE 2016, held in Beppu, Japan, in October 2016. The 25 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 46 submissions. The focus of the papers is on fundamental studies of string processes and information retrieval and its applications for example to areas such as bioinformatics, Web mining and others.

23rd International Symposium, SPIRE 2016, Beppu, Japan, October 18-20, 2016, Proceedings

String Processing and Information Retrieval

This open access book summarizes the first two decades of the NII Testbeds and Community for Information access Research (NTCIR). NTCIR is a series of evaluation forums run by a global team of researchers and hosted by the National Institute of Informatics (NII), Japan. The book is unique in that it discusses not just what was done at NTCIR, but also how it was done and the impact it has achieved. For example, in some chapters the reader sees the early seeds of what eventually grew to be the search engines that provide access to content on the World Wide Web, todays smartphones that can tailor what they show to the needs of their owners, and the smart speakers that enrich our lives at home and on the move. We also get glimpses into how new search engines can be built for mathematical formulae, or for the digital record of a lived human life. Key to the success of the NTCIR endeavor was early recognition that information access research is an empirical discipline and that evaluation therefore lay at the core of the enterprise. Evaluation is thus at the heart of each chapter in this book. They show, for example, how the recognition that some documents are more important than others has shaped thinking about evaluation design. The thirty-three contributors to this volume speak for the many hundreds of researchers from dozens of countries around the world who together shaped NTCIR as organizers and participants. This book is suitable for researchers, practitioners, and students--anyone who wants to learn about past and present evaluation efforts in information retrieval, information access, and natural language processing, as well as those who want to participate in an evaluation task or even to design and organize one.

NTCIR's Legacy of Research Impact

Evaluating Information Retrieval and Access Tasks

Gary Geunbae Lee

Dawei Song

Chin-Yew Lin

Akiko Aizawa

Kazuko Kuriyama

Masaharu Yoshioka

Asia Information Retrieval Symposium (AIRS) 2009 was the ?fth AIRS conf- ence in the seriesestablished in 2004.The ?rst AIRS washeld in Beijing, China, the second in Jeju, Korea, the third in Singapore and the fourth in Harbin, China. The AIRS conferences trace their roots to the successful Information Retrieval with Asian Languages (IRAL) workshops, which started in 1996. The AIRS series aims to bring together international researchers and dev- opers to exchange new ideas and the latest results in information retrieval. The scope of the conference encompassed the theory and practice of all aspects of information retrieval in text, audio, image, video, and multimedia data. AIRS2009received82submissions,fromwhichwecarefullyselected18regular papers(22%)and20(24%)postersthroughadouble-blindreviewingprocess.We are pleased to report that the conference proceedings include contributions from not only Asian countries,but also from Finland, Italy, Australia,UK and USA. We are grateful to Elizabeth Liddy, chair of ACM SIGIR, for accepting to be the honorary conference chair, and to Hokkaido University for hosting the c- ference. We thank the Information Retrieval Facility, Microsoft Research Asia, Ricoh, Ltd., Global COE Program “Center for Next-Generation Information TechnologyBasedonKnowledgeDiscoveryandKnowledgeFederation” andS- poro International Communication Plaza Foundation for sponsoring the conf- ence, and Springer for publishing the conference proceedings as part of their Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) series. We also thank ACM SIGIR and IPSJ SIGFI for giving the conference an “in cooperation with” status.

5th Asia Information Retrieval Symposium, AIRS 2009, Sapporo, Japan, October 21-23, 2009, Proceedings

Information Retrieval Technology

Hang Li

Wei-Ying Ma

Ting Liu

Kam-Fai Wong

Guodong Zhou

AsiaInformationRetrievalSymposium(AIRS)2008wasthefourthAIRSconf- ence in the series established in 2004.The ?rst AIRS washeld in Beijing, China, the second in Jeju, Korea, and the third in Singapore. The AIRS conferences trace their roots to the successful Information Retrieval with Asian Languages (IRAL) workshops, which started in 1996. The AIRS series aims to bring together international researchers and dev- opers to exchange new ideas and the latest results in information retrieval. The scope of the conference encompasses the theory and practice of all aspects of information retrieval in text, audio, image, video, and multimedia data. We are pleased to report that AIRS 2006 receiveda largenumber of 144 s- missions. Submissions came from all continents: Asia, Europe, North America, South America and Africa. We accepted 39 submissions as regular papers (27%) and 45 as short papers (31%). All submissions underwent double-blind revi- ing. We aregratefulto all the area Co-chairswho managedthe review processof their respective area e?ciently, as well as to all the Program Committee m- bers and additional reviewers for their e?orts to get reviews in on time despite the tight time schedule. We are pleased that the proceedings are published by Springer as part of their Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) series and that the papers are EI-indexed.

4th Asia Information Retrieval Symposium, AIRS 2008, Harbin, China, January 15-18, 2008, Revised Selected Papers

Tetsuya Sakai

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