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Relevance Judgment Convergence Degree -- A Measure of Inconsistency among Assessors for Information Retrieval

Relevance judgment of human assessors is inherently subjective and dynamic when evaluation datasets are created for Information Retrieval (IR) systems. However, a small group of experts' relevance judgment results are usually taken as ground truth to "objectively" evaluate the performance of the IR systems. Recent trends intend to employ a group of judges, such as outsourcing, to alleviate the potentially biased judgment results stemmed from using only a single expert's judgment. Nevertheless, different judges may have different opinions and may not agree with each other, and the inconsistency in human relevance judgment may affect the IR system evaluation results. In this research, we introduce a Relevance Judgment Convergence Degree (RJCD) to measure the quality of queries in the evaluation datasets. Experimental results reveal a strong correlation coefficient between the proposed RJCD score and the performance differences between the two IR systems.