Scalable Semantic Matching of Queries to Ads in Sponsored Search Advertising

Sponsored search represents a major source of revenue for web search engines. This popular advertising model brings a unique possibility for advertisers to target users' immediate intent communicated through a search query, usually by displaying their ads alongside organic search results for queries deemed relevant to their products or services. However, due to a large number of unique queries it is challenging for advertisers to identify all such relevant queries. For this reason search engines often provide a service of advanced matching, which automatically finds additional relevant queries for advertisers to bid on. We present a novel advanced matching approach based on the idea of semantic embeddings of queries and ads. The embeddings were learned using a large data set of user search sessions, consisting of search queries, clicked ads and search links, while utilizing contextual information such as dwell time and skipped ads. To address the large-scale nature of our problem, both in terms of data and vocabulary size, we propose a novel distributed algorithm for training of the embeddings. Finally, we present an approach for overcoming a cold-start problem associated with new ads and queries. We report results of editorial evaluation and online tests on actual search traffic. The results show that our approach significantly outperforms baselines in terms of relevance, coverage, and incremental revenue. Lastly, we open-source learned query embeddings to be used by researchers in computational advertising and related fields.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figures, 39th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, SIGIR 2016, Pisa, Ital

A Graph-Based Semantics Workbench for Concurrent Asynchronous Programs

A number of novel programming languages and libraries have been proposed that offer simpler-to-use models of concurrency than threads. It is challenging, however, to devise execution models that successfully realise their abstractions without forfeiting performance or introducing unintended behaviours. This is exemplified by SCOOP---a concurrent object-oriented message-passing language---which has seen multiple semantics proposed and implemented over its evolution. We propose a "semantics workbench" with fully and semi-automatic tools for SCOOP, that can be used to analyse and compare programs with respect to different execution models. We demonstrate its use in checking the consistency of semantics by applying it to a set of representative programs, and highlighting a deadlock-related discrepancy between the principal execution models of the language. Our workbench is based on a modular and parameterisable graph transformation semantics implemented in the GROOVE tool. We discuss how graph transformations are leveraged to atomically model intricate language abstractions, and how the visual yet algebraic nature of the model can be used to ascertain soundness.Comment: Accepted for publication in the proceedings of FASE 2016 (to appear

Term graph rewriting and garbage collection using opfibrations

AbstractThe categorical semantics of (an abstract version of) the general term graph rewriting language DACTL is investigated. The operational semantics is reformulated in order to reveal its universal properties. The technical dissonance between the matchings of left-hand sides of rules to redexes, and the properties of rewrite rules themselves, is taken as the impetus for expressing the core of the model as a Grothendieck opfibration of a category of general rewrites over a base of general rewrite rules. Garbage collection is examined in this framework in order to reconcile the treatment with earlier approaches. It is shown that term rewriting has particularly good garbage-theoretic properties that do not generalise to all cases of graph rewriting and that this has been a stumbling block for aspects of some earlier models for graph rewriting

Query2doc: Query Expansion with Large Language Models

This paper introduces a simple yet effective query expansion approach, denoted as query2doc, to improve both sparse and dense retrieval systems. The proposed method first generates pseudo-documents by few-shot prompting large language models (LLMs), and then expands the query with generated pseudo-documents. LLMs are trained on web-scale text corpora and are adept at knowledge memorization. The pseudo-documents from LLMs often contain highly relevant information that can aid in query disambiguation and guide the retrievers. Experimental results demonstrate that query2doc boosts the performance of BM25 by 3% to 15% on ad-hoc IR datasets, such as MS-MARCO and TREC DL, without any model fine-tuning. Furthermore, our method also benefits state-of-the-art dense retrievers in terms of both in-domain and out-of-domain results.Comment: 9 page

Constructive Tensor Field Theory: The T34T^4_3 Model

We build constructively the simplest tensor field theory which requires some renormalization, namely the rank three tensor theory with quartic interactions and propagator inverse of the Laplacian on $U(1)^3$. This superrenormalizable tensor field theory has a power counting almost similar to ordinary $\phi^4_2$. Our construction uses the multiscale loop vertex expansion (MLVE) recently introduced in the context of an analogous vector model. However to prove analyticity and Borel summability of this model requires new estimates on the intermediate field integration, which is now of matrix rather than of scalar type.Comment: 24 pages, 5 figures. Substantially improved version. Version v1 is correct but treats a model which is simplified at the level of the two point function. This version treats the full model, without any simplificatio