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. 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.