Diversification for multi-domain result sets

Abstract

Multi-domain search answers to queries spanning multiple entities, like "Find an affordable house in a city with low criminality index, good schools and medical services", 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., inexpensive houses) tend to appear repeatedly in top-ranked combinations. To improve the quality of the result set, it is important to balance relevance (i.e., high values of the ranking function) 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.