Unsupervised Rank Aggregation with Domain-Specific Expertise

Consider the setting where a panel of judges is repeatedly asked to (partially) rank sets of objects according to given criteria, and assume that the judges' expertise depends on the objects' domain. Learning to aggregate their rankings with the goal of producing a better joint ranking is a fundamental problem in many areas of Information Retrieval and Natural Language Processing, amongst others. However, supervised ranking data is generally difficult to obtain, especially if coming from multiple domains. Therefore, we propose a framework for learning to aggregate votes of constituent rankers with domain specific expertise without supervision. We apply the learning framework to the settings of aggregating full rankings and aggregating top-k lists, demonstrating significant improvements over a domain-agnostic baseline in both cases.

Alexandre Klementiev, Dan Roth, Kevin Small, Ivan Titov