Addressing Diverse User Preferences: A Framework for Query Results Navigation Zhiyuan Chen University of Maryland, Baltimore County zhchen@umbc.edu Tao Li Florida International University taoli@cs.fiu.edu Abstract Database queries are often exploratory and users often find their queries return too many answers, many of them irrelevant. Existing approaches include categorization, ranking, and query refinement. The success of all these approaches depends on the utilization of user preferences. However, most existing work assumes that all users have the same user preferences, but in real life different users often have different preferences. In this paper, we propose a framework that addresses diverse user preferences in query results navigation. 1 Introduction Database queries are often exploratory and users often find their queries return too many answers, many of them irrelevant. Three approaches have been proposed to solve this problem. The first approach [4] categorizes query results into a navigational tree. The second approach [2, 5, 1] ranks the results. The third approach refines queries based on user feedbacks [8]. The success of all three approaches depends on the utilization of user preferences. However, most existing work assumes that all users have the same user preferences, but in real life different users often have different preferences. In this paper, we propose a framework that addresses diverse user preferences in query results navigation. This framework uses a tree-based method and a cluster-based method to help user navigation. The tree-based method was originally proposed in [6]. Next we describe these methods in Section 2 and Section 3. Section 4 describes some future research directions. 2 Tree-based Method We first describe a motivating example in Section 2.1. We then describe the tree based method in Section 2.2. 2.1 A Motivating Example Example 1. Consider a mutual fund selection website. Figure 1 shows a fraction of a navigational tree generated using a method proposed in [4] over 193 mutual funds returned by a query with the condition fund name like ‘%Vanguard%’. Each tree node specifies the range or equality conditions on an attribute, and the number in the Copyright 2009 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the IEEE. Bulletin of the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Data Engineering 1