Mean reciprocal rank

The mean reciprocal rank is a statistic measure for evaluating any process that produces a list of possible responses to a sample of queries, ordered by probability of correctness. The reciprocal rank of a query response is the multiplicative inverse of the rank of the first correct answer: 1 for first place, 12 for second place, 13 for third place and so on. The mean reciprocal rank is the average of the reciprocal ranks of results for a sample of queries Q:[1][2]

where refers to the rank position of the first relevant document for the i-th query.

The reciprocal value of the mean reciprocal rank corresponds to the harmonic mean of the ranks.

  1. ^ E.M. Voorhees (1999). "Proceedings of the 8th Text Retrieval Conference" (PDF). TREC-8 Question Answering Track Report. pp. 77–82.
  2. ^ D. R. Radev; H. Qi; H. Wu; W. Fan (2002). "Evaluating web-based question answering systems" (PDF). Proceedings of LREC.