Fusion-based methods for result diversification in web search

Abstract

Search result diversification of text documents is especially necessary when a user issues a faceted or ambiguous query to the search engine. A variety of approaches have been proposed to deal with this issue in recent years. In this article, we propose a group of fusion-based result diversification methods with the aim to improve performance that considers both relevance and diversity. They are linear combinations of scores that are obtained from different component search systems. The weight of each search system is determined by considering three factors: performance, dissimilarity, and complementarity. There are two major contributions. Firstly, we find that all the three factors of performance and complementarity and dissimilarity are useful for effective weighting of linear combination. Secondly, we present the logarithmic function-based model for converting ranking information into scores. Experiments are carried out with four groups of results submitted to the TREC web diversity task. Experimental results show that some of the fusion methods that use the aforementioned techniques perform more effectively than the state-of-the-art fusion methods for result diversification.