RMITIR at the NTCIR-17 FairWeb-1 Task

This report describes the participation of the RMIT IR group at the NTCIR-17 FairWeb-1 task. We submitted five runs with the aim of exploring the role of explicit search result diversification (SRD) and ranking fusion to generate fair rankings considering multiple fairness attributes. We also explored the use of a linear combination-based technique (LC) to take into consideration the relevance while re-ranking. In this report, we compared results from all our submitted runs against each other and the retrieval baselines along each topic type separately (i.e., Researcher, Movie, YouTube). Overall, our results show that neither the SRD-based runs nor the linear combination-based runs show any statistically significant improvement over the retrieval baselines. The source code of the framework for generating group memberships is made available at https://github.com/rmit-ir/fairweb-1.