Binary and graded relevance in IR evaluations-Comparison of the effects on ranking of IR systems

In this study the rankings of IR systems based on binary and graded relevance in TREC 7 and 8 data are compared. Relevance of a sample TREC results is reassessed using a relevance scale with four levels: non-relevant, marginally relevant, fairly relevant, highly relevant. Twenty-one topics and 90 systems from TREC 7 and 20 topics and 121 systems from TREC 8 form the data. Binary precision, and cumulated gain, discounted cumulated gain and normalised discounted cumulated gain are the measures compared. Different weighting schemes for relevance levels are tested with cumulated gain measures. Kendall's rank correlations are computed to determine to what extent the rankings produced by different measures are similar. Weighting schemes from binary to emphasising highly relevant documents form a continuum, where the measures correlate strongly in the binary end, and less in the heavily weighted end. The results show the different character of the measures.