A Survival Modeling Approach to Biomedical Search Result Diversification Using Wikipedia

In this paper, we propose a survival modeling approach to promoting ranking diversity for biomedical information retrieval. The proposed approach concerns with finding relevant documents that can deliver more different aspects of a query. First, two probabilistic models derived from the survival analysis theory are proposed for measuring aspect novelty. Second, a new method using Wikipedia to detect aspects covered by retrieved documents is presented. Third, an aspect filter based on a two-stage model is introduced. It ranks the detected aspects in decreasing order of the probability that an aspect is generated by the query. Finally, the relevance and the novelty of retrieved documents are combined at the aspect level for reranking. Experiments conducted on the TREC 2006 and 2007 Genomics collections demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach in promoting ranking diversity for biomedical information retrieval. Moreover, we further evaluate our approach in the Web retrieval environment. The evaluation results on the ClueWeb09-T09B collection show that our approach can achieve promising performance improvements.