8,236 research outputs found
Beyond Keywords and Relevance: A Personalized Ad Retrieval Framework in E-Commerce Sponsored Search
On most sponsored search platforms, advertisers bid on some keywords for
their advertisements (ads). Given a search request, ad retrieval module
rewrites the query into bidding keywords, and uses these keywords as keys to
select Top N ads through inverted indexes. In this way, an ad will not be
retrieved even if queries are related when the advertiser does not bid on
corresponding keywords. Moreover, most ad retrieval approaches regard rewriting
and ad-selecting as two separated tasks, and focus on boosting relevance
between search queries and ads. Recently, in e-commerce sponsored search more
and more personalized information has been introduced, such as user profiles,
long-time and real-time clicks. Personalized information makes ad retrieval
able to employ more elements (e.g. real-time clicks) as search signals and
retrieval keys, however it makes ad retrieval more difficult to measure ads
retrieved through different signals. To address these problems, we propose a
novel ad retrieval framework beyond keywords and relevance in e-commerce
sponsored search. Firstly, we employ historical ad click data to initialize a
hierarchical network representing signals, keys and ads, in which personalized
information is introduced. Then we train a model on top of the hierarchical
network by learning the weights of edges. Finally we select the best edges
according to the model, boosting RPM/CTR. Experimental results on our
e-commerce platform demonstrate that our ad retrieval framework achieves good
performance
Lifelong Sequential Modeling with Personalized Memorization for User Response Prediction
User response prediction, which models the user preference w.r.t. the
presented items, plays a key role in online services. With two-decade rapid
development, nowadays the cumulated user behavior sequences on mature Internet
service platforms have become extremely long since the user's first
registration. Each user not only has intrinsic tastes, but also keeps changing
her personal interests during lifetime. Hence, it is challenging to handle such
lifelong sequential modeling for each individual user. Existing methodologies
for sequential modeling are only capable of dealing with relatively recent user
behaviors, which leaves huge space for modeling long-term especially lifelong
sequential patterns to facilitate user modeling. Moreover, one user's behavior
may be accounted for various previous behaviors within her whole online
activity history, i.e., long-term dependency with multi-scale sequential
patterns. In order to tackle these challenges, in this paper, we propose a
Hierarchical Periodic Memory Network for lifelong sequential modeling with
personalized memorization of sequential patterns for each user. The model also
adopts a hierarchical and periodical updating mechanism to capture multi-scale
sequential patterns of user interests while supporting the evolving user
behavior logs. The experimental results over three large-scale real-world
datasets have demonstrated the advantages of our proposed model with
significant improvement in user response prediction performance against the
state-of-the-arts.Comment: SIGIR 2019. Reproducible codes and datasets:
https://github.com/alimamarankgroup/HPM
Sequential Selection of Correlated Ads by POMDPs
Online advertising has become a key source of revenue for both web search
engines and online publishers. For them, the ability of allocating right ads to
right webpages is critical because any mismatched ads would not only harm web
users' satisfactions but also lower the ad income. In this paper, we study how
online publishers could optimally select ads to maximize their ad incomes over
time. The conventional offline, content-based matching between webpages and ads
is a fine start but cannot solve the problem completely because good matching
does not necessarily lead to good payoff. Moreover, with the limited display
impressions, we need to balance the need of selecting ads to learn true ad
payoffs (exploration) with that of allocating ads to generate high immediate
payoffs based on the current belief (exploitation). In this paper, we address
the problem by employing Partially observable Markov decision processes
(POMDPs) and discuss how to utilize the correlation of ads to improve the
efficiency of the exploration and increase ad incomes in a long run. Our
mathematical derivation shows that the belief states of correlated ads can be
naturally updated using a formula similar to collaborative filtering. To test
our model, a real world ad dataset from a major search engine is collected and
categorized. Experimenting over the data, we provide an analyse of the effect
of the underlying parameters, and demonstrate that our algorithms significantly
outperform other strong baselines
Adaptive Neural Ranking Framework: Toward Maximized Business Goal for Cascade Ranking Systems
Cascade ranking is widely used for large-scale top-k selection problems in
online advertising and recommendation systems, and learning-to-rank is an
important way to optimize the models in cascade ranking. Previous works on
learning-to-rank usually focus on letting the model learn the complete order or
top-k order, and adopt the corresponding rank metrics (e.g. OPA and NDCG@k) as
optimization targets. However, these targets can not adapt to various cascade
ranking scenarios with varying data complexities and model capabilities; and
the existing metric-driven methods such as the Lambda framework can only
optimize a rough upper bound of limited metrics, potentially resulting in
sub-optimal and performance misalignment. To address these issues, we propose a
novel perspective on optimizing cascade ranking systems by highlighting the
adaptability of optimization targets to data complexities and model
capabilities. Concretely, we employ multi-task learning to adaptively combine
the optimization of relaxed and full targets, which refers to metrics
Recall@m@k and OPA respectively. We also introduce permutation matrix to
represent the rank metrics and employ differentiable sorting techniques to
relax hard permutation matrix with controllable approximate error bound. This
enables us to optimize both the relaxed and full targets directly and more
appropriately. We named this method as Adaptive Neural Ranking Framework
(abbreviated as ARF). Furthermore, we give a specific practice under ARF. We
use the NeuralSort to obtain the relaxed permutation matrix and draw on the
variant of the uncertainty weight method in multi-task learning to optimize the
proposed losses jointly. Experiments on a total of 4 public and industrial
benchmarks show the effectiveness and generalization of our method, and online
experiment shows that our method has significant application value.Comment: 12 pages, Accepted by www202
Counterfactual Learning from Bandit Feedback under Deterministic Logging: A Case Study in Statistical Machine Translation
The goal of counterfactual learning for statistical machine translation (SMT)
is to optimize a target SMT system from logged data that consist of user
feedback to translations that were predicted by another, historic SMT system. A
challenge arises by the fact that risk-averse commercial SMT systems
deterministically log the most probable translation. The lack of sufficient
exploration of the SMT output space seemingly contradicts the theoretical
requirements for counterfactual learning. We show that counterfactual learning
from deterministic bandit logs is possible nevertheless by smoothing out
deterministic components in learning. This can be achieved by additive and
multiplicative control variates that avoid degenerate behavior in empirical
risk minimization. Our simulation experiments show improvements of up to 2 BLEU
points by counterfactual learning from deterministic bandit feedback.Comment: Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
(EMNLP), 2017, Copenhagen, Denmar
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