Evaluation

Terrier uses jtreceval to provide the evaluation of standard retrieval runs. jtreceval contains trec_eval compiled to run under various standard platforms (e.g. Windows/Linux/Mac x86). For unsupported platforms, Terrier also includes a legacy Java evaluation package for evaluating results of TREC adhoc and named-page finding tasks.

Before running an evaluation, we need to specify the relevance assessments file in the property trec.qrels. To evaluate all .res result files in folder var/results, we can type the following:

bin/trec_terrier.sh -e

The above command evaluates each .res file in folder var/results using trec_eval. We can evaluate for a particular result file by giving the filename in the command line:

bin/trec_terrier.sh -e InL2c1.0_0.res

or

bin/trec_terrier.sh -e ./var/results/InL2c1.0_0.res

The above command evaluates only ./var/results/InL2c1.0_0.res. For a result file named x.res, the evaluation result is saved in file x.eval, which contains the content as shown in the following example:

runid   all InL2c1.0
num_q   all 93
num_ret all 91930
num_rel all 2083
num_rel_ret all 1941
map all 0.2948
gm_map  all 0.1980
Rprec   all 0.2998
bpref   all 0.9359
recip_rank  all 0.7134
iprec_at_recall_0.00    all 0.7376
iprec_at_recall_0.10    all 0.6431
iprec_at_recall_0.20    all 0.5232
iprec_at_recall_0.30    all 0.4079
iprec_at_recall_0.40    all 0.3424
iprec_at_recall_0.50    all 0.2710
iprec_at_recall_0.60    all 0.2028
iprec_at_recall_0.70    all 0.1555
iprec_at_recall_0.80    all 0.1075
iprec_at_recall_0.90    all 0.0607
iprec_at_recall_1.00    all 0.0245
P_5 all 0.4667
P_10    all 0.3677
P_15    all 0.3097
P_20    all 0.2747
P_30    all 0.2394
P_100   all 0.1285
P_200   all 0.0789
P_500   all 0.0382
P_1000  all 0.0209

The above displayed evaluation measures are averaged over a batch of queries. We can obtain per-query results by using option -p in the command line:

bin/trec_terrier.sh -e PL2c1.0_0.res -p

The resulting output saved in the corresponding .eval file will contain further results, with the middle column indicating the query id.

Using trec_eval directly

Terrier ships with treceval, which contains trec_eval binaries that work on Linux x86, Mac OS X x86_64 and Windows x86. You can therefore use easily trec_eval directly from the command line, by invoking the trec_eval.sh script:


bin/trec_eval.sh qrels var/results/PL2c1.0_0.res

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Contact: School of Computing Science
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