Graded Relevance Assessments and Graded Relevance Measures of NTCIR: A Survey of the First Twenty Years

NTCIR was the first large-scale IR evaluation conference to construct test collections with graded relevance assessments: the NTCIR-1 test collections from 1998 already featured relevant and partially relevant documents. In this paper, I first describe a few graded-relevance measures that originated from NTCIR (and a few variants) which are used across different NTCIR tasks. I then provide a survey on the use of graded relevance assessments and of graded relevance measures in the past NTCIR tasks which primarily tackled ranked retrieval. My survey shows that the majority of the past tasks fully utilised graded relevance by means of graded evaluation measures, but not all of them; interestingly, even a few relatively recent tasks chose to adhere to binary relevance measures. I conclude this paper by a summary of my survey in table form, and a brief discussion on what may lie beyond graded relevance.