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Information Retrieval (IR) is concerned with ranking information resources with respect to user information needs, delivering a wide range of key applications for industry and society, such as Web search engines [Croft et al. 2009], intellectual property, and patent search [Lupu and Hanbury 2013], and many others. The performance of IR systems is determined not only by their efficiency but also and most importantly by their effectiveness, that is, their ability to retrieve and better rank relevant information resources while at the same time suppressing the retrieval of not relevant ones. Due to the many sources of uncertainty, as for example vague user information needs, unstructured information sources, or subjective notion of relevance, experimental evaluation is the only mean to assess the performances of IR systems from the effectiveness point of view. Experimental evaluation relies on the Cranfield paradigm, which …