Intent-aware search result diversification

• DOI: 10.1145/2009916.2009997
• Publication Date: 2011-07-26T14:09:37Z
• Authors: Rodrygo L.T. Santos; Craig Macdonald; Iadh Ounis
• Keywords: 0202 electrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineering; 02 engineering and technology

Search result diversification has gained momentum as a way to tackle ambiguous queries. An effective approach to this problem is to explicitly model the possible aspects underlying a query, in order to maximise the estimated relevance of the retrieved documents with respect to the different aspects. However, such aspects themselves may represent information needs with rather distinct intents (e.g., informational or navigational). Hence, a diverse ranking could benefit from applying intent-aware retrieval models when estimating the relevance of documents to different aspects. In this paper, we propose to diversify the results retrieved for a given query, by learning the appropriateness of different retrieval models for each of the aspects underlying this query. Thorough experiments within the evaluation framework provided by the diversity task of the TREC 2009 and 2010 Web tracks show that the proposed approach can significantly improve state-of-the-art diversification approaches.