Vertical intent prediction approach based on Doc2vec and convolutional neural networks for improving vertical selection in aggregated search

Vertical selection is the task of selecting the most relevant verticals to a given query in order to improve the diversity and quality of web search results. This task requires not only predicting relevant verticals but also these verticals must be those the user expects to be relevant for his particular information need. Most existing works focused on using traditional machine learning techniques to combine multiple types of features for selecting several relevant verticals. Although these techniques are very efficient, handling vertical selection with high accuracy is still a challenging research task. In this paper, we propose an approach for improving vertical selection in order to satisfy the user vertical intent and reduce user’s browsing time and efforts. First, it generates query embeddings vectors using the doc2vec algorithm that preserves syntactic and semantic information within each query. Secondly, this vector will be used as input to a convolutional neural network model for increasing the representation of the query with multiple levels of abstraction including rich semantic information and then creating a global summarization of the query features. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach through comprehensive experimentation using various datasets. Our experimental findings show that our system achieves significant accuracy. Further, it realizes accurate predictions on new unseen data

Assessing and predicting vertical intent for web queries

Abstract. Aggregating search results from a variety of heterogeneous sources, i.e. so-called verticals [1], such as news, image, video and blog, into a single interface has become a popular paradigm in web search. In this paper, we present the results of a user study that collected more than 1,500 assessments of vertical intent over 320 web topics. Firstly, we show that users prefer diverse vertical content for many queries and that the level of inter-assessor agreement for the task is fair [2]. Secondly, we propose a methodology to predict the vertical intent of a query using a search engine log by exploiting click-through data, and show that it outperforms traditional approaches.