76,841 research outputs found
Estimating Position Bias without Intrusive Interventions
Presentation bias is one of the key challenges when learning from implicit
feedback in search engines, as it confounds the relevance signal. While it was
recently shown how counterfactual learning-to-rank (LTR) approaches
\cite{Joachims/etal/17a} can provably overcome presentation bias when
observation propensities are known, it remains to show how to effectively
estimate these propensities. In this paper, we propose the first method for
producing consistent propensity estimates without manual relevance judgments,
disruptive interventions, or restrictive relevance modeling assumptions. First,
we show how to harvest a specific type of intervention data from historic
feedback logs of multiple different ranking functions, and show that this data
is sufficient for consistent propensity estimation in the position-based model.
Second, we propose a new extremum estimator that makes effective use of this
data. In an empirical evaluation, we find that the new estimator provides
superior propensity estimates in two real-world systems -- Arxiv Full-text
Search and Google Drive Search. Beyond these two points, we find that the
method is robust to a wide range of settings in simulation studies
IRGAN: A Minimax Game for Unifying Generative and Discriminative Information Retrieval Models
This paper provides a unified account of two schools of thinking in
information retrieval modelling: the generative retrieval focusing on
predicting relevant documents given a query, and the discriminative retrieval
focusing on predicting relevancy given a query-document pair. We propose a game
theoretical minimax game to iteratively optimise both models. On one hand, the
discriminative model, aiming to mine signals from labelled and unlabelled data,
provides guidance to train the generative model towards fitting the underlying
relevance distribution over documents given the query. On the other hand, the
generative model, acting as an attacker to the current discriminative model,
generates difficult examples for the discriminative model in an adversarial way
by minimising its discrimination objective. With the competition between these
two models, we show that the unified framework takes advantage of both schools
of thinking: (i) the generative model learns to fit the relevance distribution
over documents via the signals from the discriminative model, and (ii) the
discriminative model is able to exploit the unlabelled data selected by the
generative model to achieve a better estimation for document ranking. Our
experimental results have demonstrated significant performance gains as much as
23.96% on Precision@5 and 15.50% on MAP over strong baselines in a variety of
applications including web search, item recommendation, and question answering.Comment: 12 pages; appendix adde
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