5,472 research outputs found
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
Distributional semantics beyond words: Supervised learning of analogy and paraphrase
There have been several efforts to extend distributional semantics beyond
individual words, to measure the similarity of word pairs, phrases, and
sentences (briefly, tuples; ordered sets of words, contiguous or
noncontiguous). One way to extend beyond words is to compare two tuples using a
function that combines pairwise similarities between the component words in the
tuples. A strength of this approach is that it works with both relational
similarity (analogy) and compositional similarity (paraphrase). However, past
work required hand-coding the combination function for different tasks. The
main contribution of this paper is that combination functions are generated by
supervised learning. We achieve state-of-the-art results in measuring
relational similarity between word pairs (SAT analogies and SemEval~2012 Task
2) and measuring compositional similarity between noun-modifier phrases and
unigrams (multiple-choice paraphrase questions)
Multi-Perspective Relevance Matching with Hierarchical ConvNets for Social Media Search
Despite substantial interest in applications of neural networks to
information retrieval, neural ranking models have only been applied to standard
ad hoc retrieval tasks over web pages and newswire documents. This paper
proposes MP-HCNN (Multi-Perspective Hierarchical Convolutional Neural Network)
a novel neural ranking model specifically designed for ranking short social
media posts. We identify document length, informal language, and heterogeneous
relevance signals as features that distinguish documents in our domain, and
present a model specifically designed with these characteristics in mind. Our
model uses hierarchical convolutional layers to learn latent semantic
soft-match relevance signals at the character, word, and phrase levels. A
pooling-based similarity measurement layer integrates evidence from multiple
types of matches between the query, the social media post, as well as URLs
contained in the post. Extensive experiments using Twitter data from the TREC
Microblog Tracks 2011--2014 show that our model significantly outperforms prior
feature-based as well and existing neural ranking models. To our best
knowledge, this paper presents the first substantial work tackling search over
social media posts using neural ranking models.Comment: AAAI 2019, 10 page
Neural Vector Spaces for Unsupervised Information Retrieval
We propose the Neural Vector Space Model (NVSM), a method that learns
representations of documents in an unsupervised manner for news article
retrieval. In the NVSM paradigm, we learn low-dimensional representations of
words and documents from scratch using gradient descent and rank documents
according to their similarity with query representations that are composed from
word representations. We show that NVSM performs better at document ranking
than existing latent semantic vector space methods. The addition of NVSM to a
mixture of lexical language models and a state-of-the-art baseline vector space
model yields a statistically significant increase in retrieval effectiveness.
Consequently, NVSM adds a complementary relevance signal. Next to semantic
matching, we find that NVSM performs well in cases where lexical matching is
needed.
NVSM learns a notion of term specificity directly from the document
collection without feature engineering. We also show that NVSM learns
regularities related to Luhn significance. Finally, we give advice on how to
deploy NVSM in situations where model selection (e.g., cross-validation) is
infeasible. We find that an unsupervised ensemble of multiple models trained
with different hyperparameter values performs better than a single
cross-validated model. Therefore, NVSM can safely be used for ranking documents
without supervised relevance judgments.Comment: TOIS 201
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