Query quality: user ratings and system predictions

Numerous studies have examined the ability of query performance prediction methods to estimate a query's quality for system effectiveness measures (such as average precision). However, little work has explored the relationship between these methods and user ratings of query quality. In this poster, we report the findings from an empirical study conducted on the TREC ClueWeb09 corpus, where we compared and contrasted user ratings of query quality against a range of query performance prediction methods. Given a set of queries, it is shown that user ratings of query quality correlate to both system effectiveness measures and a number of pre-retrieval predictors.