Fast Approximate Filtering of Search Results Sorted by Attribute

Several Web search services enable their users with the possibility of sorting the list of results by a specific attribute, e.g., sort “by price” in e-commerce. However, sorting the results by attribute could bring marginally relevant results in the top positions thus leading to a poor user experience. This motivates the definition of the relevance-aware filtering problem. This problem asks to remove results from the attribute-sorted list to maximize its final overall relevance. Recently, an optimal solution to this problem has been proposed. However, it has strong limitations in the Web scenario due to its high computational cost. In this paper, we propose ϵ-Filtering: an efficient approximate algorithm with strong approximation guarantees on the relevance of the final list. More precisely, given an allowed approximation error ϵ, the proposed algorithm finds a (1-ϵ)–optimal filtering, i.e., the relevance of its solution is at least (1-ϵ) times the optimum. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation of ϵ-Filtering against state-of-the-art competitors on two real-world public datasets. Experiments show that ϵ-Filtering achieves the desired levels of effectiveness with a speedup of up to two orders of magnitude with respect to the optimal solution while guaranteeing very small approximation errors.