Extended Overview of the Living Labs for Information Retrieval Evaluation (LL4IR) CLEF Lab 2015

Abstract

In this extended overview paper we discuss the first Living Labs for Information Retrieval Evaluation (LL4IR) lab which was held at CLEF 2015. The idea with living labs is to provide a benchmarking platform for researchers to evaluate their ranking systems in a live setting with real users in their natural task environments. LL4IR represents the first attempt to offer such experimental platform to the IR research community in the form of a community challenge. For this first edition of the challenge we focused on two specific use-cases: product search and web search. Ranking systems submitted by participants were experimentally compared using interleaved comparisons to the production system from the corresponding use-case. In this paper we describe how these experiments were performed, what the resulting outcomes are, and provide a detailed analysis of the use-cases and a discussion of ideas and opportunities for future development.