Database queries are often used to select and rank items as decision support for many applications. As automated decision-making tools become more prevalent, there is a growing recognition of the need to diversify their outcomes. In this paper, we define and study the problem of modifying the selection conditions of an ORDER BY query so that the result of the modified query closely fits some user-defined notion of diversity while simultaneously maintaining the intent of the original query. We show the hardness of this problem and propose a Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) based solution. We further present optimizations designed to enhance the scalability and applicability of the solution in real-life scenarios. We investigate the performance characteristics of our algorithm and show its efficiency and the usefulness of our optimizations.

翻译：数据库查询通常用于为许多应用的选择和排序决策提供支持。随着自动化决策工具日益普及，人们越来越意识到需要使其结果多样化。本文定义并研究了修改ORDER BY查询选择条件的问题，使得修改后查询的结果既紧密符合用户定义的多样化概念，又同时保留原始查询的意图。我们证明了该问题的难度，并提出了一种基于混合整数线性规划（MILP）的解决方案。此外，我们还提出了旨在增强该方案在实际场景中可扩展性和适用性的优化方法。我们研究了算法的性能特征，展示了其效率以及所提优化的实用性。