Integrating Understandability in the Evaluation of Consumer Health Search Engines

In this paper we propose a method that integrates the notion of understandability, as a factor of document relevance, into the evaluation of information retrieval systems for consumer health search. We consider the gain-discount evaluation framework (RBP, nDCG, ERR) and propose two understandability-based variants (uRBP) of rank biased precision, characterised by an estimation of understandability based on document readability and by different models of how readability influences user understanding of document content. The proposed uRBP measures are empirically contrasted to RBP by comparing system rankings obtained with each measure. The findings suggest that considering understandability along with topicality in the evaluation of information retrieval systems lead to different claims about systems effectiveness than considering topicality alone.