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Fast Feature Selection for Learning to Rank

Published: 12 September 2016 Publication History

Abstract

An emerging research area named Learning-to-Rank (LtR) has shown that effective solutions to the ranking problem can leverage machine learning techniques applied to a large set of features capturing the relevance of a candidate document for the user query. Large-scale search systems must however answer user queries very fast, and the computation of the features for candidate documents must comply with strict back-end latency constraints. The number of features cannot thus grow beyond a given limit, and Feature Selection (FS) techniques have to be exploited to find a subset of features that both meets latency requirements and leads to high effectiveness of the trained models. In this paper, we propose three new algorithms for FS specifically designed for the LtR context where hundreds of continuous or categorical features can be involved. We present a comprehensive experimental analysis conducted on publicly available LtR datasets and we show that the proposed strategies outperform a well-known state-of-the-art competitor.

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Cited By

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  • (2024)ReNeuIR at SIGIR 2024: The Third Workshop on Reaching Efficiency in Neural Information RetrievalProceedings of the 47th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval10.1145/3626772.3657994(3051-3054)Online publication date: 10-Jul-2024
  • (2024)Dimension Importance Estimation for Dense Information RetrievalProceedings of the 47th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval10.1145/3626772.3657691(1318-1328)Online publication date: 10-Jul-2024
  • (2024)Is Interpretable Machine Learning Effective at Feature Selection for Neural Learning-to-Rank?Advances in Information Retrieval10.1007/978-3-031-56066-8_29(384-402)Online publication date: 24-Mar-2024
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cover image ACM Conferences
ICTIR '16: Proceedings of the 2016 ACM International Conference on the Theory of Information Retrieval
September 2016
318 pages
ISBN:9781450344975
DOI:10.1145/2970398
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Publication History

Published: 12 September 2016

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Author Tags

  1. feature selection
  2. learning to rank

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  • Short-paper

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  • European Commission

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ICTIR '16
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ICTIR '16 Paper Acceptance Rate 41 of 79 submissions, 52%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 235 of 527 submissions, 45%

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Cited By

View all
  • (2024)ReNeuIR at SIGIR 2024: The Third Workshop on Reaching Efficiency in Neural Information RetrievalProceedings of the 47th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval10.1145/3626772.3657994(3051-3054)Online publication date: 10-Jul-2024
  • (2024)Dimension Importance Estimation for Dense Information RetrievalProceedings of the 47th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval10.1145/3626772.3657691(1318-1328)Online publication date: 10-Jul-2024
  • (2024)Is Interpretable Machine Learning Effective at Feature Selection for Neural Learning-to-Rank?Advances in Information Retrieval10.1007/978-3-031-56066-8_29(384-402)Online publication date: 24-Mar-2024
  • (2023)Early Exit Strategies for Learning-to-Rank CascadesIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2023.333108811(126691-126704)Online publication date: 2023
  • (2022)A graph-based feature selection method for learning to rank using spectral clustering for redundancy minimization and biased PageRank for relevance analysisComputer Science and Information Systems10.2298/CSIS201220042Y19:1(141-164)Online publication date: 2022
  • (2022)Towards Feature Selection for Ranking and Classification Exploiting Quantum AnnealersProceedings of the 45th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval10.1145/3477495.3531755(2814-2824)Online publication date: 6-Jul-2022
  • (2022)The Istella22 DatasetProceedings of the 45th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval10.1145/3477495.3531740(3099-3107)Online publication date: 6-Jul-2022
  • (2022)HiPerMovelets: high-performance movelet extraction for trajectory classificationInternational Journal of Geographical Information Science10.1080/13658816.2021.201859336:5(1012-1036)Online publication date: 3-Jan-2022
  • (2021)Neural Feature Selection for Learning to RankAdvances in Information Retrieval10.1007/978-3-030-72240-1_34(342-349)Online publication date: 28-Mar-2021
  • (2019)Risk-Sensitive Learning to Rank with Evolutionary Multi-Objective Feature SelectionACM Transactions on Information Systems10.1145/330019637:2(1-34)Online publication date: 14-Feb-2019
  • Show More Cited By

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