TIRA: Configuring, Executing, and Disseminating Information Retrieval Experiments

With its close ties to the Web, the information retrieval community is destined to leverage the dissemination and collaboration capabilities that the Web provides today. Especially with the advent of the software as a service principle, an information retrieval community is conceivable that publishes executable experiments by anyone over the Web. A review of recent SIGIR papers shows that we are far away from this vision of collaboration. The benefits of publishing information retrieval experiments as a service are striking for the community as a whole, including potential to boost research profiles and reputation. However, the additional work must be kept to a minimum and sensitive data must be kept private for this paradigm to become an accepted practice. In order to foster experiments as a service in information retrieval, we present the TIRA (Testbed for Information Retrieval Algorithms) web framework that addresses the outlined challenges and possesses a unique set of compelling features in comparison to existing web-based solutions. To describe TIRA in a practical setting, we explain how it is currently used as an official evaluation platform for the well-established PAN international plagiarism detection competition. We also describe how it can be used in future scenarios for search result clustering of non-static collections of web query results, as well as within a simulation data mining setting to support interactive structural design in civil engineering.