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On Including the User Dynamic in Learning to Rank

Published: 07 August 2017 Publication History
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  • Abstract

    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.

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    Cited By

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    • (2024)Mitigating the Impact of Inaccurate Feedback in Dynamic Learning-to-Rank: A Study of Overlooked Interesting ItemsACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology10.1145/3653983Online publication date: 26-Mar-2024
    • (2022)Can Clicks Be Both Labels and Features?Proceedings of the 45th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval10.1145/3477495.3531948(6-17)Online publication date: 6-Jul-2022
    • (2019)Exploiting User Signals and Stochastic Models to Improve Information Retrieval Systems and EvaluationACM SIGIR Forum10.1145/3308774.330880552:2(174-175)Online publication date: 17-Jan-2019
    • Show More Cited By

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    SIGIR '17: Proceedings of the 40th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval
    August 2017
    1476 pages
    ISBN:9781450350228
    DOI:10.1145/3077136
    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 ACM 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: 07 August 2017

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    Author Tags

    1. lambdamart
    2. learning to rank
    3. user dynamic

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    Funding Sources

    • EC H2020 Program
    • SID 2016

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    SIGIR '17 Paper Acceptance Rate 78 of 362 submissions, 22%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 792 of 3,983 submissions, 20%

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    Cited By

    View all
    • (2024)Mitigating the Impact of Inaccurate Feedback in Dynamic Learning-to-Rank: A Study of Overlooked Interesting ItemsACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology10.1145/3653983Online publication date: 26-Mar-2024
    • (2022)Can Clicks Be Both Labels and Features?Proceedings of the 45th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval10.1145/3477495.3531948(6-17)Online publication date: 6-Jul-2022
    • (2019)Exploiting User Signals and Stochastic Models to Improve Information Retrieval Systems and EvaluationACM SIGIR Forum10.1145/3308774.330880552:2(174-175)Online publication date: 17-Jan-2019
    • (2019)Boosting learning to rank with user dynamics and continuation methodsInformation Retrieval Journal10.1007/s10791-019-09366-9Online publication date: 5-Nov-2019
    • (2018)Learning to lurker rank: an evaluation of learning-to-rank methods for lurking behavior analysisSocial Network Analysis and Mining10.1007/s13278-018-0516-z8:1Online publication date: 1-Jun-2018
    • (2017)LEARning Next gEneration Rankers (LEARNER 2017)Proceedings of the ACM SIGIR International Conference on Theory of Information Retrieval10.1145/3121050.3121110(331-332)Online publication date: 1-Oct-2017
    • (2017)Thirty Years of Digital Libraries Research at the University of Padua: The User SideDigital Libraries and Multimedia Archives10.1007/978-3-319-73165-0_5(42-54)Online publication date: 21-Dec-2017

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