IRVILAB: Gamified Searching on Multilingual Wikipedia

Information retrieval (IR) evaluation can be considered as a form of competition in matching documents and queries. This paper introduces a learning environment based on gamification of query construction for document retrieval, called IRVILAB (Information Retrieval Virtual Lab). The lab has modules for creating standard evaluation settings, one for topic creation including relevance assessments and another for performance evaluation of user queries. In addition, multilingual Wikipedia online collection enables a module, where relevance assessments are translated to other languages. The underlying game utilizes IR performance metrics to measure and give feedback on participants' information retrieval performance. It aims to improve participants' search skills, subject knowledge and contributes to science education by introducing an experimental method. Distinctive features of the system include algorithmic relevance assessments and automatic recall base translation.