Information networks are widely used to characterize the relationships between data items such as text documents. Many important retrieval and mining tasks rely on ranking the data items based on their centrality or prestige in the network. Beyond prestige, diversity has been recognized as a crucial objective in ranking, aiming at providing a nonredundant and high coverage piece of information in the top ranked results. Nevertheless, existing network-based ranking approaches either disregard

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... concern of diversity, or handle it with non-optimized heuristics, usually based on greedy vertex selection. We propose a novel ranking algorithm, DivRank, based on a reinforced random walk in an information network. This model automatically balances the prestige and the diversity of the top ranked vertices in a principled way. DivRank not only has a clear optimization explanation, but also well connects to classical models in mathematics and network science. We evaluate DivRank using empirical experiments on three different networks as well as a text summarization task. DivRank outperforms existing network-based ranking methods in terms of enhancing diversity in prestige.