Measuring the informativeness of a retrieval process

Evaluation of information retrieval systems should be based on measures of the information provided by the retrieval process, “informativeness” measures which take into account the interactive and full-text nature of present-day systems and the different types of questions which are asked of them. Desirable properties for an informativeness measure are developed, including context sensitivity, user centrality, and logarithmic response. A hypergraph-based framework for measuring the informativeness of a retrieval process is presented and a measure developed which satisfies the desired properties. The measure is compared to previously developed information measures and illustrated via an application.