Learning with Sparse and Biased Feedback for Personal Search

Learning with Sparse and Biased Feedback for Personal Search

Michael Bendersky, Xuanhui Wang, Marc Najork, Donald Metzler

Proceedings of the Twenty-Seventh International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Best Sister Conferences. Pages 5219-5223. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2018/725

Personal search, including email, on-device, and personal media search, has recently attracted a considerable attention from the information retrieval community. In this paper, we provide an overview of challenges and opportunities of learning with implicit user feedback (e.g., click data) in personal search. Implicit user feedback provides a convenient source of supervision for ranking models in personal search. This feedback, however, has two major drawbacks: it is highly sparse and biased due to the personal nature of queries and documents. We demonstrate how these drawbacks can be overcome, and empirically demonstrate the benefits of learning with implicit feedback in the context of a large-scale email search engine.
Keywords:
Humans and AI: Personalization and User Modeling
Natural Language Processing: Information Retrieval
Multidisciplinary Topics and Applications: Information Retrieval