mNIR: Diversifying Search Results Based on a Mixture of Novelty, Intention and Relevance

Current search engines do not explicitly take different meanings and usages of user queries into consideration when they rank the search results. As a result, they tend to retrieve results that cover the most popular meanings or usages of the query. Consequently, users who want results that cover a rare meaning or usage of query or results that cover all different meanings/usages may have to go through a large number of results in order to find the desired ones. Another problem with current search engines is that they do not adequately take users’ intention into consideration. In this paper, we introduce a novel result ranking algorithm (mNIR) that explicitly takes result novelty, user intention-based distribution and result relevancy into consideration and mixes them to achieve better result ranking. We analyze how giving different emphasis to the above three aspects would impact the overall ranking of the results. Our approach builds on our previous method for identifying and ranking possible categories of any user query based on the meanings and usages of the terms and phrases within the query. These categories are also used to generate category queries for retrieving results matching different meanings/usages of the original user query. Our experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can outperform state-of-the-art diversification approaches.