SA4

Introduction to Computational Advertising
Evgeniy Gabrilovich, Vanja Josifovski and Bo Pang

Web advertising is the primary driving force behind many Web activities, including Internet search and publishing of online content by third-party providers. A new discipline - Computational Advertising - has recently emerged, which studies the process of advertising on the Internet from a variety of angles. A successful advertising campaign should be relevant to the user's information need as well as more generally to user's background and personalized interest profile, be economically worthwhile to the advertiser and the intermediaries, as well as not detrimental to user experience.

The tutorial does not assume any prior knowledge of Web advertising, and will focus on one important aspect of online advertising, namely, contextual relevance. In most cases the context of user actions is defined by a body of text, hence the ad matching problem lends itself to many NLP methods. At first approximation, the process of obtaining relevant ads can be reduced to conventional information retrieval. We show how to augment the standard information retrieval approach using query expansion and text classification techniques. We demonstrate how to employ a relevance feedback assumption and use the Web as a repository of relevant query-specific knowledge. The last part of the tutorial will be devoted to open research problems that computational advertising poses in text summarization, natural language generation, named entity extraction, computer-human interaction, and others.

Evgeniy Gabrilovich is a Senior Research Scientist at Yahoo! Research. His interests include information retrieval, machine learning, and computational linguistics. Evgeniy served on the program committees of ACL, AAAI, WWW, CIKM, JCDL, EMNLP, and COLING. Evgeniy earned his PhD in Computer Science from the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology.

http://research.yahoo.com/Evgeniy_Gabrilovich

Vanja Josifovski is a Principal Research Scientist at Yahoo! Research, where he works on search and advertisement technologies for the Internet. Vanja earned his PhD from the Linkoping University in Sweden. Vanja published over thirty peer-reviewed publications, and was on the program committees of WWW, SIGIR, ICDE, VLDB and other major conferences.

http://research.yahoo.com/Vanja_Josifovski

Bo Pang is a Research Scientist at Yahoo! Research. Her primary research interests are in natural language processing, machine learning, and information retrieval. She obtained her PhD in Computer Science from Cornell University. Bo served on the program committees of ACL, HLT-NAACL, EMNLP, and AAAI.

http://research.yahoo.com/Bo_Pang

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