Contribution of Precision to Overall Performance in Ad-hoc Tasks

Characterize the contribution of precision to overall scores in Ad-hoc tasks under the LSC pooled evaluation scoring function and determine whether precision has significant predictive value distinct from recall.

Background

The authors conduct correlation analyses of groundtruth distribution and retrieval metrics for Ad-hoc tasks. They find recall to be the strongest predictor of high scores, while precision shows a moderate but statistically non-significant correlation with scores.

Given this non-significant relationship, the authors explicitly note that the contribution of precision to overall performance remains unclear, suggesting the need for further analysis of precision’s role within the scoring framework.