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Exploratory search increasingly becomes an important research topic. Our interests focus on task-based information exploration, a specific type of exploratory search performed by a range of professional users, such as intelligence analysts. In this paper, we present an evaluation framework designed specifically for assessing and comparing performance of innovative information access tools created to support the work of intelligence analysts in the context of task-based information exploration. The motivation for the development of this framework came from our needs for testing systems in task-based information exploration, which cannot be satisfied by existing frameworks. The new framework is closely tied with the kind of tasks that intelligence analysts perform: complex, dynamic, and multiple facets and multiple stages. It views the user rather than the information system as the center of the evaluation, and …