On Including the user dynamic in learning to rank

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingArticle in proceedingsResearchpeer-review

Ranking query results effectively by considering user past behaviour and preferences is a primary concern for IR researchers both in academia and industry. In this context, LtR is widely believed to be the most effective solution to design ranking models that account for user-interaction features that have proved to remarkably impact on IR effectiveness. In this paper, we explore the possibility of integrating the user dynamic directly into the LtR algorithms. Specifically, we model with Markov chains the behaviour of users in scanning a ranked result list and we modify LambdaMart, a state-of-The-Art LtR algorithm, to exploit a new discount loss function calibrated on the proposed Markovian model of user dynamic. We evaluate the performance of the proposed approach on publicly available LtR datasets, finding that the improvements measured over the standard algorithm are statistically significant.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationSIGIR 2017 - Proceedings of the 40th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval
Number of pages4
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery, Inc.
Publication date7 Aug 2017
Pages1041-1044
ISBN (Electronic)9781450350228
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 7 Aug 2017
Externally publishedYes
Event40th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, SIGIR 2017 - Tokyo, Shinjuku, Japan
Duration: 7 Aug 201711 Aug 2017

Conference

Conference40th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, SIGIR 2017
LandJapan
ByTokyo, Shinjuku
Periode07/08/201711/08/2017
SponsorAssociation for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval (ACM SIGIR)

    Research areas

  • LambdaMart, Learning to rank, User dynamic

ID: 216517264