So, I suppose the next steps are to formalize this project a little
more. I'll call a vote on a separate thread to add it as a Lucene
sub. I figured I would contact infrastructure to see what they
think. Was also thinking that maybe we should talk with iBiblio or
some other content repository to see if they can help overcome the
bandwidth problem.
-Grant
On May 11, 2009, at 6:12 PM, Grant Ingersoll wrote:
On May 11, 2009, at 4:01 PM, Michael McCandless wrote:
I'd love to see a resource like this (it's high time!), and I'll try
to help when/where I can, starting with some initial
comments/questions:
I think it's actually quite a challenge to do well. EG it's easy to
make a corpus that's too easy because it's highly diverse (and thus
most search engines have no trouble pulling back relevant results).
Instead, I think the content set should be well & tightly scoped to a
certain topic, and not necessarily that large (ie we don't need a
huge
number of documents). It would help if that scoping is towards
content that many people find "of interest" so we get "accurate"
judgements by as wide an audience as possible.
I think we will want a generic one, and then focused ones, but we
should start with generic at first.
EG how about coverage of the 2009 H1N1 outbreak (that's licensed
appropriately)? Or... the 2008 US presidential election? Or...
research on Leukemia (but I fear such content is not typically
licensed appropriately, nor will it have wide interest).
What does "using Nutch to crawl Creative Commons" actually mean? Can
I browse the content that's being crawled?
Nutch has a CC plugin that allows it to filter out non-CC content,
AIUI.
Also, to help us build up the relevance judgements, I think we should
build a basic custom app for collecting queries as well as annotating
them. I should be able to go to that page and run my own queries,
which are collected. Then, I should be able to browse previously
collected queries, click on them, and add my own judgement. The site
should try to offer up queries that are "in need" of judgements. It
should run the search and let me step through the results, marking
those that are relevant; but we would then bias the results to that
search engine; maybe under the hood we rotate through search engines
each time?
Do we have anyone involved who's built similar corpora before? Or
has
anyone read papers on how prior corpora were designed/created?
This is all good, but here I'm thinking simpler, at least at first.
I don't know that we need to be writing apps, although feel free,
since it is O/S after all. :-) I was wondering if we couldn't
handle this wiki style (how is still not clear) whereby we simply
have pages that contain the queries and judgments and over time the
wisdom of the crowds will work to maintain standards, fill in gaps,
etc. Maybe, in regards to judgments, we allow people to vote for
them, which over time will yield an appropriate result (but is
subject to early issues). Not sure what all that means just yet,
but the wiki approach allows us to get going with minimal resources
while still delivering value. Hmm, now it's starting to sound like
an app... ;-)
As opposed to TREC style stuff, I don't think we need the top 1000
(although it could work). Just the top ten or twenty. Sometimes,
it can even be useful to just rate a whole page of results at once,
even at the cost of granularity. Basically, what I'm proposing we
do is carry out a pragmatic relevance test out in the open, just as
people should do in house. I think this fits with Lucene's model of
operation quite well: be practical by focusing on real data and real
feedback as opposed to obsessing over theory. (Not that you were
suggesting otherwise, I'm just stating it)
I need to find the reference, but I recall the last edition of SIGIR
having a discussion on crowdsourcing relevance judgments.
-Grant
--------------------------
Grant Ingersoll
http://www.lucidimagination.com/
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