Sequential Diversification with Provable Guarantees

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Wang, Honglian, Tu, Sijing, Gionis, Aristides
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Wang, Honglian
Tu, Sijing
Gionis, Aristides
author_facet Wang, Honglian
Tu, Sijing
Gionis, Aristides
contents Diversification is a useful tool for exploring large collections of information items. It has been used to reduce redundancy and cover multiple perspectives in information-search settings. Diversification finds applications in many different domains, including presenting search results of information-retrieval systems and selecting suggestions for recommender systems. Interestingly, existing measures of diversity are defined over \emph{sets} of items, rather than evaluating \emph{sequences} of items. This design choice comes in contrast with commonly-used relevance measures, which are distinctly defined over sequences of items, taking into account the ranking of items. The importance of employing sequential measures is that information items are almost always presented in a sequential manner, and during their information-exploration activity users tend to prioritize items with higher~ranking. In this paper, we study the problem of \emph{maximizing sequential diversity}. This is a new measure of \emph{diversity}, which accounts for the \emph{ranking} of the items, and incorporates \emph{item relevance} and \emph{user behavior}. The overarching framework can be instantiated with different diversity measures, and here we consider the measures of \emph{sum~diversity} and \emph{coverage~diversity}. The problem was recently proposed by Coppolillo et al.~\citep{coppolillo2024relevance}, where they introduce empirical methods that work well in practice. Our paper is a theoretical treatment of the problem: we establish the problem hardness and present algorithms with constant approximation guarantees for both diversity measures we consider. Experimentally, we demonstrate that our methods are competitive against strong baselines.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2412_10944
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Sequential Diversification with Provable Guarantees
Wang, Honglian
Tu, Sijing
Gionis, Aristides
Data Structures and Algorithms
G.1.2
Diversification is a useful tool for exploring large collections of information items. It has been used to reduce redundancy and cover multiple perspectives in information-search settings. Diversification finds applications in many different domains, including presenting search results of information-retrieval systems and selecting suggestions for recommender systems. Interestingly, existing measures of diversity are defined over \emph{sets} of items, rather than evaluating \emph{sequences} of items. This design choice comes in contrast with commonly-used relevance measures, which are distinctly defined over sequences of items, taking into account the ranking of items. The importance of employing sequential measures is that information items are almost always presented in a sequential manner, and during their information-exploration activity users tend to prioritize items with higher~ranking. In this paper, we study the problem of \emph{maximizing sequential diversity}. This is a new measure of \emph{diversity}, which accounts for the \emph{ranking} of the items, and incorporates \emph{item relevance} and \emph{user behavior}. The overarching framework can be instantiated with different diversity measures, and here we consider the measures of \emph{sum~diversity} and \emph{coverage~diversity}. The problem was recently proposed by Coppolillo et al.~\citep{coppolillo2024relevance}, where they introduce empirical methods that work well in practice. Our paper is a theoretical treatment of the problem: we establish the problem hardness and present algorithms with constant approximation guarantees for both diversity measures we consider. Experimentally, we demonstrate that our methods are competitive against strong baselines.
title Sequential Diversification with Provable Guarantees
topic Data Structures and Algorithms
G.1.2
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.10944