Enhancing topical ranking with preferences from click-through data

ABSTRACT

To overcome the training data insufficiency problem for dedicated model in topical ranking, this paper proposes to utilize click-through data to improve learning. The efficacy of click-through data is explored under the framework of preference learning. The empirical experiment on a commercial search engine shows that, the model trained with the dedicated labeled data combined with skip-next preferences could beat the baseline model and the generic model in NDCG5 for 4.9% and 2.4% respectively.

REFERENCES

• 1: Thorsten Joachims , Laura Granka , Bing Pan , Helene Hembrooke , Geri Gay, Accurately interpreting clickthrough data as implicit feedback, Proceedings of the 28th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval, August 15-19, 2005, Salvador, Brazil [doi>10.1145/1076034.1076063]
• 2: T. Y. Liu. Learning to rank for information retrieval. SIGIR tutorial, 2008.
• 3: Zhaohui Zheng , Keke Chen , Gordon Sun , Hongyuan Zha, A regression framework for learning ranking functions using relative relevance judgments, Proceedings of the 30th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval, July 23-27, 2007, Amsterdam, The Netherlands [doi>10.1145/1277741.1277792]

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.3 INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL
      H.3.3 Information Search and Retrieval
          Subjects: Relevance feedback

General Terms:
Algorithms, Experimentation, Human Factors

Keywords:
click-through data, preference learning, topical ranking