Evaluating Streams of Evolving News Events
Bibliographic record
Abstract
People track news events according to their interests and available time. For a major event of great personal interest, they might check for updates several times an hour, taking time to keep abreast of all aspects of the evolving event. For minor events of more marginal interest, they might check back once or twice a day for a few minutes to learn about the most significant developments. Systems generating streams of updates about evolving events can improve user performance by appropriately filtering these updates, making it easy for users to track events in a timely manner without undue information overload. Unfortunately, predicting user performance on these systems poses a significant challenge. Standard evaluation methodology, designed for Web search and other adhoc retrieval tasks, adapts poorly to this context. In this paper, we develop a simple model that simulates users checking the system from time to time to read updates. For each simulated user, we generate a trace of their activities alternating between away times and reading times. These traces are then applied to measure system effectiveness. We test our model using data from the TREC 2013 Temporal Summarization Track (TST) comparing it to the effectiveness measures used in that track. The primary TST measure corresponds most closely with a modeled user that checks back once a day on average for an average of one minute. Users checking more frequently for longer times may view the relative performance of participating systems quite differently. In light of this sensitivity to user behavior, we recommend that future experiments be built around clearly stated assumptions regarding user interfaces and access patterns, with effectiveness measures reflecting these assumptions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.009 | 0.040 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".