We study several questions related to diversifying search results. We give improved approximation algorithms in each of the following problems, together with some lower bounds. 1) We give a polynomial-time approximation scheme (PTAS) for a diversified search ranking problem [Nikhil Bansal et al., 2010] whose objective is to minimizes the discounted cumulative gain. Our PTAS runs in time n^{2^O(log(1/ε)/ε)} ⋅ m^O(1) where n denotes the number of elements in the databases and m denotes the number of constraints. Complementing this result, we show that no PTAS can run in time f(ε) ⋅ (nm)^{2^o(1/ε)} assuming Gap-ETH and therefore our running time is nearly tight. Both our upper and lower bounds answer open questions from [Nikhil Bansal et al., 2010]. 2) We next consider the Max-Sum Dispersion problem, whose objective is to select k out of n elements from a database that maximizes the dispersion, which is defined as the sum of the pairwise distances under a given metric. We give a quasipolynomial-time approximation scheme (QPTAS) for the problem which runs in time n^{O_ε(log n)}. This improves upon previously known polynomial-time algorithms with approximate ratios 0.5 [Refael Hassin et al., 1997; Allan Borodin et al., 2017]. Furthermore, we observe that reductions from previous work rule out approximation schemes that run in n^õ_ε(log n) time assuming ETH. 3) Finally, we consider a generalization of Max-Sum Dispersion called Max-Sum Diversification. In addition to the sum of pairwise distance, the objective also includes another function f. For monotone submodular function f, we give a quasipolynomial-time algorithm with approximation ratio arbitrarily close to (1-1/e). This improves upon the best polynomial-time algorithm which has approximation ratio 0.5 [Allan Borodin et al., 2017]. Furthermore, the (1-1/e) factor is also tight as achieving better-than-(1-1/e) approximation is NP-hard [Uriel Feige, 1998].
@InProceedings{abboud_et_al:LIPIcs.ICALP.2022.7, author = {Abboud, Amir and Cohen-Addad, Vincent and Lee, Euiwoong and Manurangsi, Pasin}, title = {{Improved Approximation Algorithms and Lower Bounds for Search-Diversification Problems}}, booktitle = {49th International Colloquium on Automata, Languages, and Programming (ICALP 2022)}, pages = {7:1--7:18}, series = {Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)}, ISBN = {978-3-95977-235-8}, ISSN = {1868-8969}, year = {2022}, volume = {229}, editor = {Boja\'{n}czyk, Miko{\l}aj and Merelli, Emanuela and Woodruff, David P.}, publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik}, address = {Dagstuhl, Germany}, URL = {https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.ICALP.2022.7}, URN = {urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-163481}, doi = {10.4230/LIPIcs.ICALP.2022.7}, annote = {Keywords: Approximation Algorithms, Complexity, Data Mining, Diversification} }
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