We describe the state-of-the-art in performance modeling and prediction for Information Retrieval (IR), Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Recommender Systems (RecSys) along with its shortcomings and strengths. We present a framework for further research, identifying five major problem areas: understanding measures, performance analysis, making underlying assumptions explicit, identifying application features determining performance, and the development of prediction models describing the relationship between assumptions, features and resulting performance.
@Article{ferro_et_al:DagMan.7.1.96, author = {Ferro, Nicola and Fuhr, Norbert and Grefenstette, Gregory and Konstan, Joseph A. and Castells, Pablo and Daly, Elizabeth M. and Declerck, Thierry and Ekstrand, Michael D. and Geyer, Werner and Gonzalo, Julio and Kuflik, Tsvi and Lind\'{e}n, Krister and Magnini, Bernardo and Nie, Jian-Yun and Perego, Raffaele and Shapira, Bracha and Soboroff, Ian and Tintarev, Nava and Verspoor, Karin and Willemsen, Martijn C. and Zobel, Justin}, title = {{From Evaluating to Forecasting Performance: How to Turn Information Retrieval, Natural Language Processing and Recommender Systems into Predictive Sciences (Dagstuhl Perspectives Workshop 17442)}}, pages = {96--139}, journal = {Dagstuhl Manifestos}, ISSN = {2193-2433}, year = {2018}, volume = {7}, number = {1}, editor = {Ferro, Nicola and Fuhr, Norbert and Grefenstette, Gregory and Konstan, Joseph A. and Castells, Pablo and Daly, Elizabeth M. and Declerck, Thierry and Ekstrand, Michael D. and Geyer, Werner and Gonzalo, Julio and Kuflik, Tsvi and Lind\'{e}n, Krister and Magnini, Bernardo and Nie, Jian-Yun and Perego, Raffaele and Shapira, Bracha and Soboroff, Ian and Tintarev, Nava and Verspoor, Karin and Willemsen, Martijn C. and Zobel, Justin}, publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik}, address = {Dagstuhl, Germany}, URL = {https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/DagMan.7.1.96}, URN = {urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-98987}, doi = {10.4230/DagMan.7.1.96}, annote = {Keywords: Information Systems, Formal models, Evaluation, Simulation, User Interaction} }
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