First Experiences with TIRA for Reproducible Evaluation in Information Retrieval.

Abstract

The verifiability and comparability of computational experiments is a major shortcoming in scientific publications, even at top conferences. In recent years, various services emerged that try to address this problem by providing a global platform where researchers can upload programs along with experiment results. However, these platforms are not well accepted, partly due to their inherent topdown character: a single institution prescribes the formats and technologies to be used. We argue that a community-wide evaluation platform can evolve only from an ongoing bottom-up effort. For the field of information retrieval we have been undertaking concrete steps to launch and foster this idea with TIRA [4]. Here, we present the concept and an implementation of a web-based experimentation environment that greatly simplifies maintenance and publishing of executable experiments for a research group. TIRA’s system architecture retains researcher’s full control over their research assets; moreover, no constraints with respect to data formats or programming technologies are prescribed. We see several reasons for researchers to publish their experiments as a web service with TIRA, namely, to simplify their experiment design and execution, to gain credibility, and to easily disseminate results. This paper reports on experiences from developing TIRA towards our goal. Design goals are reviewed, existing evaluation platforms are analyzed, and the architecture of our current implementation is presented. In particular, we present insights from the first widespread use of TIRA at the PAN series of international plagiarism detection competitions in 2012. Altogether, our review is promising: the design decisions underlying TIRA are both powerful and flexible enough to cope with the widely varying programming preferences of the researchers.

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