Comparing the Performance of Adaptive Filtering and Ranked Output Systems

Some insight into the behavior of adaptive filtering systems may be gained by comparing them with similar ranked-output retrieval systems. This is not easy; however, a new optimization measure, introduced for the TREC-9 filtering track, makes some such comparison possible. A series of experiments using the TREC-9 filtering data shows that filtering effectiveness is comparable to routing effectiveness, and demonstrates the gains to be made from adaptation.