Diversification for multi-domain result sets

Abstract

Multi-domain search answers to queries spanning multiple entities, like "Find a hotel in Milan close to a concert venue, a museum and a good restaurant", by producing ranked sets of entity combinations that maximize relevance, measured by a function expressing the user's preferences. Due to the combinatorial nature of results, good entity instances (e.g., five stars hotels) tend to appear repeatedly in top-ranked combinations. To improve the quality of the result set, it is important to balance relevance with diversity, which promotes different, yet almost equally relevant, entities in the top-k combinations. This paper explores two different notions of diversity for multi-domain result sets, compares experimentally alternative algorithms for the trade-off between relevance and diversity, and performs a user study for evaluating the utility of diversification in multi-domain queries. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.