Ranking Entity Facets based on User Click Feedback

Roelof van Zwol, Lluis Garcia Pueyo, Mridul Muralidharan, Börkur Sigurbjörnsson.

Fourth IEEE International Conference on Semantic Computing (ICSC 2010). [IEEE] [ACM DL]

The research described in this paper forms the backbone of a service that enables the faceted search experience of the Yahoo! search engine. We introduce an approach for a machine learned ranking of entity facets based on user click feedback and features extracted from three different ranking sources. The objective of the learned model is to predict the click-through rate on an entity facet. In an empirical evaluation we compare the performance of gradient boosted decision trees (GBDT) against a linear combination of features on two different click feedback models using the raw click-through rate (CTR), and click over expected clicks (COEC). The results show a significant improvement in retrieval performance, in terms of discounted cumulated gain, when ranking entity facets with GBDT trained on the COEC model. Most notably this is true when evaluated against the CTR test set.

@inproceedings{10.1109/ICSC.2010.33,
author = {Zwol, Roelof van and Pueyo, Lluis Garcia and Muralidharan, Mridul and Sigurbjornsson, Borkur},
title = {Ranking Entity Facets Based on User Click Feedback},
year = {2010},
isbn = {9780769541549},
publisher = {IEEE Computer Society},
address = {USA},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSC.2010.33},
doi = {10.1109/ICSC.2010.33},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2010 IEEE Fourth International Conference on Semantic Computing},
pages = {192–199},
numpages = {8},
keywords = {click feedback, faceted entity ranking, facets, machine learning},
series = {ICSC '10}
}