Document Comprehensiveness and User Preferences in Novelty Search Tasks

Different users may be attempting to satisfy different information needs while providing the same query to a search engine. Addressing that issue is addressing Novelty and Diversity in information retrieval. Novelty and Diversity search task models the task wherein users are interested in seeing more and more documents that are not only relevant, but also cover more aspects (or subtopics) related to the topic of interest. This is in contrast with the traditional IR task where topical relevance is the only factor in evaluating search results. In this paper, we conduct a user study where users are asked to give a preference between one of two documents B and C given a query and also given that they have already seen a document A. We then test a total of ten hypotheses pertaining to the relationship between the "comprehensiveness" of documents (i.e. the number of subtopics a document is relevant to) and real users' preference judgments. Our results show that users are inclined to prefer documents with higher comprehensiveness, even when the prior document A already covers more aspects than the two documents being compared, and even when the least preferred has a higher relevance grade. In fact, users are inclined to prefer documents with higher overall aspect-coverage even in cases where B and C are relevant to the same number of novel subtopics.