User session level diverse reranking of search results

Most Web search diversity approaches can be categorized as Document Level Diversification (DocLD), Topic Level Diversification (TopicLD) or Term Level Diversification (TermLD). DocLD selects the relevant documents with minimal content overlap to each other. It does not take the coverage of query subtopics into account. TopicLD solves this by modeling query subtopics explicitly. However, the automatic mining of query subtopics is difficult. TermLD tries to cover as many query topic terms as possible, which reduces the task of finding a query's subtopics into finding a set of representative topic terms. In this paper, we propose a novel User Session Level Diversification (UserLD) approach based on the observation that a query's subtopics are implicitly reflected by the search intents in different user sessions. Our approach consists of two phases: (I) Session Graph Construction and (II) Diversity Reranking. For a given query, phase (I) builds a Session Graph which considers relevant user sessions and preliminary retrieval results as nodes and the nodes' pairwise similarities as edge weights. Phase (II) reranks the preliminary retrieval results by minimizing a Session Graph based diversity loss function. Extensive experiments on two standard datasets of NACSIS Test Collections for IR (NTCIR) demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. The advantage of our approach lies in its ability of avoiding mining the query subtopics in advance while achieving almost the same or better performances compared with previous approaches.