Autor(es)

Sihem Amer-Yahia and Francesco Bonchi and Carlos Castillo and Esteban Feuerstein and Isabel Mendez-Diaz and Paula Zabala

URL Pública

Abstract

Users are often faced with the problem of finding complementary items that together achieve a single common goal (e.g., a starter kit for a novice astronomer, a collection of question/answers related to low-carb nutrition, a set of places to visit on holidays). In this paper, we argue that for some application scenarios returning item bundles is more appropriate than ranked lists. Thus we define composite retrieval as the problem of finding bundles of complementary items. Beyond complementarity of items, the bundles must be valid w.r.t. a given budget, and the answer set of bundles must exhibit diversity. We formally define the problem and show that in its general form is -hard and that also the special cases in which each bundle is formed by only one item, or only one bundle is sought, are hard. Our characterization however suggests how to adopt a two-phase approach (Produce-and-Choose, or PAC) in which we first …