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To: "Strzalkowski, Tomek (CRD)" <strzalkowski@crd.ge.com>
From: George Doddington <doddington@msn.com>
Subject: Re: TDT3 -- Precision vs False Alarm (postscript attachment)
Date: Thu, 11 Feb 1999 15:29:04 -0800
> George -- thanks for the tech note. I understand your rationale -- of course
> we knew that from IR that topics with lots of relevants are "easier". TREC
> organizers also used topic "hardness" to show that we are actually making
> progress in spite of sinking precision. What I worry about is practicality
> of FA measure. The harder the topic (less rich) the lower FA is needed
> to make the results practical. Precision tells you whether your result is
> usable or not: I have little use for say 1% FA if precision is also 1%.
Yes, exactly. To know whether the technology is practical, precision
is often a useful measure. To monitor research progress and determine
the value of various algorithms, FA is the better measure. It really
depends on what your focus is.
--
George Doddington at NIST: doddington@nist.gov or 301/975-3261
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Last updated Thu May 13 09:28:14 1999