Improving Result Diversity Using Query Term Proximity in Exploratory Search

Abstract

In the information retrieval system, relevance manifestation is pivotal and regularly based on document-term statistics, i.e. term frequency (tf), inverse document frequency (idf), etc. Query term proximity within matched documents is mostly under-explored. In this paper, a novel information retrieval framework is proposed, to promote the documents among all relevant retrieved ones. The relevance estimation is a weighted combination of document statistics and query term statistics, and term-term proximity is a simply aggregates of diverse user preferences aspects in query formation, thus adapted into the framework with conventional relevance measures. Intuitively, QTP is exploited to promote the documents for balanced exploitation-exploration, and eventually navigate a search towards goals. The evaluation asserts the usability of QTP measures to balance several seeking tradeoffs, e.g. relevance, novelty, result diversity (Coverage and Topicality), and overall retrieval. The assessment of user search trails indicates significant growth in a learning outcome.