Personalized Ranking in eCommerce Search

We address the problem of personalization in the context of eCommerce search. Specifically, we develop personalization ranking features that use in-session context to augment a generic ranker optimized for conversion and relevance. We use a combination of latent features learned from item co-clicks in historic sessions and content-based features that use item title and price. Personalization in search has been discussed extensively in the existing literature. The novelty of our work is combining and comparing content-based and content-agnostic features and showing that they complement each other to result in a significant improvement of the ranker. Moreover, our technique does not require an explicit re-ranking step, does not rely on learning user profiles from long term search behavior, and does not involve complex modeling of query-item-user features. Our approach captures item co-click propensity using lightweight item embeddings. We experimentally show that our technique significantly outperforms a generic ranker in terms of Mean Reciprocal Rank (MRR). We also provide anecdotal evidence for the semantic similarity captured by the item embeddings on the eBay search engine.Comment: Under Revie

Structure Selection from Streaming Relational Data

Statistical relational learning techniques have been successfully applied in a wide range of relational domains. In most of these applications, the human designers capitalized on their background knowledge by following a trial-and-error trajectory, where relational features are manually defined by a human engineer, parameters are learned for those features on the training data, the resulting model is validated, and the cycle repeats as the engineer adjusts the set of features. This paper seeks to streamline application development in large relational domains by introducing a light-weight approach that efficiently evaluates relational features on pieces of the relational graph that are streamed to it one at a time. We evaluate our approach on two social media tasks and demonstrate that it leads to more accurate models that are learned faster

Spatial and temporal-based query disambiguation for improving web search

Queries submitted to search engines are ambiguous in nature due to users’ irrelevant input which poses real challenges to web search engines both towards understanding a query and giving results. A lot of irrelevant and ambiguous information creates disappointment among users. Thus, this research proposes an ambiguity evolvement process followed by an integrated use of spatial and temporal features to alleviate the search results imprecision. To enhance the effectiveness of web information retrieval the study develops an enhanced Adaptive Disambiguation Approach for web search queries to overcome the problems caused by ambiguous queries. A query classification method was used to filter search results to overcome the imprecision. An algorithm was utilized for finding the similarity of the search results based on spatial and temporal features. Users’ selection based on web results facilitated recording of implicit feedback which was then utilized for web search improvement. Performance evaluation was conducted on data sets GISQC_DS, AMBIENT and MORESQUE comprising of ambiguous queries to certify the effectiveness of the proposed approach in comparison to a well-known temporal evaluation and two-box search methods. The implemented prototype is focused on ambiguous queries to be classified by spatial or temporal features. Spatial queries focus on targeting the location information whereas temporal queries target time in years. In conclusion, the study used search results in the context of Spatial Information Retrieval (S-IR) along with temporal information. Experiments results show that the use of spatial and temporal features in combination can significantly improve the performance in terms of precision (92%), accuracy (93%), recall (95%), and f-measure (93%). Moreover, the use of implicit feedback has a significant impact on the search results which has been demonstrated through experimental evaluation.SHAHID KAMA

Mapping queries to the Linking Open Data cloud: A case study using DBpedia.

a b s t r a c t We introduce the task of mapping search engine queries to DBpedia, a major linking hub in the Linking Open Data cloud. We propose and compare various methods for addressing this task, using a mixture of information retrieval and machine learning techniques. Specifically, we present a supervised machine learning-based method to determine which concepts are intended by a user issuing a query. The concepts are obtained from an ontology and may be used to provide contextual information, related concepts, or navigational suggestions to the user submitting the query. Our approach first ranks candidate concepts using a language modeling for information retrieval framework. We then extract query, concept, and search-history feature vectors for these concepts. Using manual annotations we inform a machine learning algorithm that learns how to select concepts from the candidates given an input query. Simply performing a lexical match between the queries and concepts is found to perform poorly and so does using retrieval alone, i.e., omitting the concept selection stage. Our proposed method significantly improves upon these baselines and we find that support vector machines are able to achieve the best performance out of the machine learning algorithms evaluated

Cascaded cross entropy-based search result diversification

Ankara : The Department of Computer Engineering and the Graduate School of Engineering and Science of Bilkent University, 2012.Thesis (Master's) -- Bilkent University, 2012.Includes bibliographical references leaves 82-86.Search engines are used to find information on the web. Retrieving relevant documents for ambiguous queries based on query-document similarity does not satisfy the users because such queries have more than one different meaning. In this study, a new method, cascaded cross entropy-based search result diversification (CCED), is proposed to list the web pages corresponding to different meanings of the query in higher rank positions. It combines modified reciprocal rank and cross entropy measures to balance the trade-off between query-document relevancy and diversity among the retrieved documents. We use the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) algorithm to compute query-document relevancy scores. The number of different meanings of an ambiguous query is estimated by complete-link clustering. We construct the first Turkish test collection for result diversification, BILDIV-2012. The performance of CCED is compared with Maximum Marginal Relevance (MMR) and IA-Select algorithms. In this comparison, the Ambient, TREC Diversity Track, and BILDIV-2012 test collections are used. We also compare performance of these algorithms with those of Bing and Google. The results indicate that CCED is the most successful method in terms of satisfying the users interested in different meanings of the query in higher rank positions of the result list.Köroğlu, BilgeM.S

Linked Data Supported Information Retrieval

Um Inhalte im World Wide Web ausfindig zu machen, sind Suchmaschienen nicht mehr wegzudenken. Semantic Web und Linked Data Technologien ermöglichen ein detaillierteres und eindeutiges Strukturieren der Inhalte und erlauben vollkommen neue Herangehensweisen an die Lösung von Information Retrieval Problemen. Diese Arbeit befasst sich mit den Möglichkeiten, wie Information Retrieval Anwendungen von der Einbeziehung von Linked Data profitieren können. Neue Methoden der computer-gestützten semantischen Textanalyse, semantischen Suche, Informationspriorisierung und -visualisierung werden vorgestellt und umfassend evaluiert. Dabei werden Linked Data Ressourcen und ihre Beziehungen in die Verfahren integriert, um eine Steigerung der Effektivität der Verfahren bzw. ihrer Benutzerfreundlichkeit zu erzielen. Zunächst wird eine Einführung in die Grundlagen des Information Retrieval und Linked Data gegeben. Anschließend werden neue manuelle und automatisierte Verfahren zum semantischen Annotieren von Dokumenten durch deren Verknüpfung mit Linked Data Ressourcen vorgestellt (Entity Linking). Eine umfassende Evaluation der Verfahren wird durchgeführt und das zu Grunde liegende Evaluationssystem umfangreich verbessert. Aufbauend auf den Annotationsverfahren werden zwei neue Retrievalmodelle zur semantischen Suche vorgestellt und evaluiert. Die Verfahren basieren auf dem generalisierten Vektorraummodell und beziehen die semantische Ähnlichkeit anhand von taxonomie-basierten Beziehungen der Linked Data Ressourcen in Dokumenten und Suchanfragen in die Berechnung der Suchergebnisrangfolge ein. Mit dem Ziel die Berechnung von semantischer Ähnlichkeit weiter zu verfeinern, wird ein Verfahren zur Priorisierung von Linked Data Ressourcen vorgestellt und evaluiert. Darauf aufbauend werden Visualisierungstechniken aufgezeigt mit dem Ziel, die Explorierbarkeit und Navigierbarkeit innerhalb eines semantisch annotierten Dokumentenkorpus zu verbessern. Hierfür werden zwei Anwendungen präsentiert. Zum einen eine Linked Data basierte explorative Erweiterung als Ergänzung zu einer traditionellen schlüsselwort-basierten Suchmaschine, zum anderen ein Linked Data basiertes Empfehlungssystem

Inferring User Needs and Tasks from User Interactions

The need for search often arises from a broad range of complex information needs or tasks (such as booking travel, buying a house, etc.) which lead to lengthy search processes characterised by distinct stages and goals. While existing search systems are adept at handling simple information needs, they offer limited support for tackling complex tasks. Accurate task representations could be useful in aptly placing users in the task-subtask space and enable systems to contextually target the user, provide them better query suggestions, personalization and recommendations and help in gauging satisfaction. The major focus of this thesis is to work towards task based information retrieval systems - search systems which are adept at understanding, identifying and extracting tasks as well as supporting user’s complex search task missions. This thesis focuses on two major themes: (i) developing efficient algorithms for understanding and extracting search tasks from log user and (ii) leveraging the extracted task information to better serve the user via different applications. Based on log analysis on a tera-byte scale data from a real-world search engine, detailed analysis is provided on user interactions with search engines. On the task extraction side, two bayesian non-parametric methods are proposed to extract subtasks from a complex task and to recursively extract hierarchies of tasks and subtasks. A novel coupled matrix-tensor factorization model is proposed that represents user based on their topical interests and task behaviours. Beyond personalization, the thesis demonstrates that task information provides better context to learn from and proposes a novel neural task context embedding architecture to learn query representations. Finally, the thesis examines implicit signals of user interactions and considers the problem of predicting user’s satisfaction when engaged in complex search tasks. A unified multi-view deep sequential model is proposed to make query and task level satisfaction prediction

Système de recherche d’information étendue basé sur une projection multi-espaces

Depuis son apparition au début des années 90, le World Wide Web (WWW ou Web) a offert un accès universel aux connaissances et le monde de l’information a été principalement témoin d’une grande révolution (la révolution numérique). Il est devenu rapidement très populaire, ce qui a fait de lui la plus grande et vaste base de données et de connaissances existantes grâce à la quantité et la diversité des données qu'il contient. Cependant, l'augmentation et l’évolution considérables de ces données soulèvent d'importants problèmes pour les utilisateurs notamment pour l’accès aux documents les plus pertinents à leurs requêtes de recherche. Afin de faire face à cette explosion exponentielle du volume de données et faciliter leur accès par les utilisateurs, différents modèles sont proposés par les systèmes de recherche d’information (SRIs) pour la représentation et la recherche des documents web. Les SRIs traditionnels utilisent, pour indexer et récupérer ces documents, des mots-clés simples qui ne sont pas sémantiquement liés. Cela engendre des limites en termes de la pertinence et de la facilité d'exploration des résultats. Pour surmonter ces limites, les techniques existantes enrichissent les documents en intégrant des mots-clés externes provenant de différentes sources. Cependant, ces systèmes souffrent encore de limitations qui sont liées aux techniques d’exploitation de ces sources d’enrichissement. Lorsque les différentes sources sont utilisées de telle sorte qu’elles ne peuvent être distinguées par le système, cela limite la flexibilité des modèles d'exploration qui peuvent être appliqués aux résultats de recherche retournés par ce système. Les utilisateurs se sentent alors perdus devant ces résultats, et se retrouvent dans l'obligation de les filtrer manuellement pour sélectionner l'information pertinente. S’ils veulent aller plus loin, ils doivent reformuler et cibler encore plus leurs requêtes de recherche jusqu'à parvenir aux documents qui répondent le mieux à leurs attentes. De cette façon, même si les systèmes parviennent à retrouver davantage des résultats pertinents, leur présentation reste problématique. Afin de cibler la recherche à des besoins d'information plus spécifiques de l'utilisateur et améliorer la pertinence et l’exploration de ses résultats de recherche, les SRIs avancés adoptent différentes techniques de personnalisation de données qui supposent que la recherche actuelle d'un utilisateur est directement liée à son profil et/ou à ses expériences de navigation/recherche antérieures. Cependant, cette hypothèse ne tient pas dans tous les cas, les besoins de l’utilisateur évoluent au fil du temps et peuvent s’éloigner de ses intérêts antérieurs stockés dans son profil. Dans d’autres cas, le profil de l’utilisateur peut être mal exploité pour extraire ou inférer ses nouveaux besoins en information. Ce problème est beaucoup plus accentué avec les requêtes ambigües. Lorsque plusieurs centres d’intérêt auxquels est liée une requête ambiguë sont identifiés dans le profil de l’utilisateur, le système se voit incapable de sélectionner les données pertinentes depuis ce profil pour répondre à la requête. Ceci a un impact direct sur la qualité des résultats fournis à cet utilisateur. Afin de remédier à quelques-unes de ces limitations, nous nous sommes intéressés dans ce cadre de cette thèse de recherche au développement de techniques destinées principalement à l'amélioration de la pertinence des résultats des SRIs actuels et à faciliter l'exploration de grandes collections de documents. Pour ce faire, nous proposons une solution basée sur un nouveau concept d'indexation et de recherche d'information appelé la projection multi-espaces. Cette proposition repose sur l'exploitation de différentes catégories d'information sémantiques et sociales qui permettent d'enrichir l'univers de représentation des documents et des requêtes de recherche en plusieurs dimensions d'interprétations. L’originalité de cette représentation est de pouvoir distinguer entre les différentes interprétations utilisées pour la description et la recherche des documents. Ceci donne une meilleure visibilité sur les résultats retournés et aide à apporter une meilleure flexibilité de recherche et d'exploration, en donnant à l’utilisateur la possibilité de naviguer une ou plusieurs vues de données qui l’intéressent le plus. En outre, les univers multidimensionnels de représentation proposés pour la description des documents et l’interprétation des requêtes de recherche aident à améliorer la pertinence des résultats de l’utilisateur en offrant une diversité de recherche/exploration qui aide à répondre à ses différents besoins et à ceux des autres différents utilisateurs. Cette étude exploite différents aspects liés à la recherche personnalisée et vise à résoudre les problèmes engendrés par l’évolution des besoins en information de l’utilisateur. Ainsi, lorsque le profil de cet utilisateur est utilisé par notre système, une technique est proposée et employée pour identifier les intérêts les plus représentatifs de ses besoins actuels dans son profil. Cette technique se base sur la combinaison de trois facteurs influents, notamment le facteur contextuel, fréquentiel et temporel des données. La capacité des utilisateurs à interagir, à échanger des idées et d’opinions, et à former des réseaux sociaux sur le Web, a amené les systèmes à s’intéresser aux types d’interactions de ces utilisateurs, au niveau d’interaction entre eux ainsi qu’à leurs rôles sociaux dans le système. Ces informations sociales sont abordées et intégrées dans ce travail de recherche. L’impact et la manière de leur intégration dans le processus de RI sont étudiés pour améliorer la pertinence des résultats. Since its appearance in the early 90's, the World Wide Web (WWW or Web) has provided universal access to knowledge and the world of information has been primarily witness to a great revolution (the digital revolution). It quickly became very popular, making it the largest and most comprehensive database and knowledge base thanks to the amount and diversity of data it contains. However, the considerable increase and evolution of these data raises important problems for users, in particular for accessing the documents most relevant to their search queries. In order to cope with this exponential explosion of data volume and facilitate their access by users, various models are offered by information retrieval systems (IRS) for the representation and retrieval of web documents. Traditional SRIs use simple keywords that are not semantically linked to index and retrieve these documents. This creates limitations in terms of the relevance and ease of exploration of results. To overcome these limitations, existing techniques enrich documents by integrating external keywords from different sources. However, these systems still suffer from limitations that are related to the exploitation techniques of these sources of enrichment. When the different sources are used so that they cannot be distinguished by the system, this limits the flexibility of the exploration models that can be applied to the results returned by this system. Users then feel lost to these results, and find themselves forced to filter them manually to select the relevant information. If they want to go further, they must reformulate and target their search queries even more until they reach the documents that best meet their expectations. In this way, even if the systems manage to find more relevant results, their presentation remains problematic. In order to target research to more user-specific information needs and improve the relevance and exploration of its research findings, advanced SRIs adopt different data personalization techniques that assume that current research of user is directly related to his profile and / or previous browsing / search experiences. However, this assumption does not hold in all cases, the needs of the user evolve over time and can move away from his previous interests stored in his profile. In other cases, the user's profile may be misused to extract or infer new information needs. This problem is much more accentuated with ambiguous queries. When multiple POIs linked to a search query are identified in the user's profile, the system is unable to select the relevant data from that profile to respond to that request. This has a direct impact on the quality of the results provided to this user. In order to overcome some of these limitations, in this research thesis, we have been interested in the development of techniques aimed mainly at improving the relevance of the results of current SRIs and facilitating the exploration of major collections of documents. To do this, we propose a solution based on a new concept and model of indexing and information retrieval called multi-spaces projection. This proposal is based on the exploitation of different categories of semantic and social information that enrich the universe of document representation and search queries in several dimensions of interpretations. The originality of this representation is to be able to distinguish between the different interpretations used for the description and the search for documents. This gives a better visibility on the results returned and helps to provide a greater flexibility of search and exploration, giving the user the ability to navigate one or more views of data that interest him the most. In addition, the proposed multidimensional representation universes for document description and search query interpretation help to improve the relevance of the user's results by providing a diversity of research / exploration that helps meet his diverse needs and those of other different users. This study exploits different aspects that are related to the personalized search and aims to solve the problems caused by the evolution of the information needs of the user. Thus, when the profile of this user is used by our system, a technique is proposed and used to identify the interests most representative of his current needs in his profile. This technique is based on the combination of three influential factors, including the contextual, frequency and temporal factor of the data. The ability of users to interact, exchange ideas and opinions, and form social networks on the Web, has led systems to focus on the types of interactions these users have at the level of interaction between them as well as their social roles in the system. This social information is discussed and integrated into this research work. The impact and how they are integrated into the IR process are studied to improve the relevance of the results