Correlation between system and user metrics in a session

Abstract

We investigate the correlations between system-oriented evaluation metrics and a few user experience metrics for a search session. The system-oriented metrics include session-based DCG (sDCG), normalized sDCG (nsDCG), estimated session nDCG (esNDCG), and a few variants of these metrics. We also look into statistics (e.g., the mean, maximum, and minimum values) of individual queries' nDCG scores, as well as the first and the last query's nDCG in a session. These system-oriented metrics are compared with users' self-rated search performance and task difficulty for a session. Experimental results show that nsDCG and esNDCG have reasonable but weak correlations with the user metrics, while the worst and the last query's nDCG in a session have comparably strong correlations. This suggests future work may better measure users' search experience in a session by modeling each query in the session differently.