SNDocRank
Multimedia ranking algorithms are usually user-neutral and measure the importance and relevance of documents by only using the visual contents and meta-data. However, users' interests and preferences are often diverse, and may demand different results even with the same queries. How can we integrate user interests in ranking algorithms to improve search results? Here, we introduce Social Network Document Rank (SNDocRank), a new ranking framework that considers a searcher's social network, and apply it to video search. SNDocRank integrates traditional tf-idf ranking with our Multi-level Actor Similarity (MAS) algorithm, which measures the similarity between social networks of a searcher and document owners. Results from our evaluation study with a social network and video data from YouTube show that SNDocRank offers search results more relevant to user's interests than other traditional ranking methods.