Reliable Feedback from Clicking Behavior in Adaptive WWW Search

A central goal of information retrieval is the design of functions that rank documents according to their relevance to a query. In this talk, we present an approach to automatically learning such ranking functions. We show that clicking behavior, which unlike hyperlink structure reflects the entire user population, can provide abundant and accurate training data for this learning task.

To establish the relationship between clicking behavior and the relevance of a page, we conducted an eye-tracking study. The study shows that a particular interpretation of clickthrough data provides reliable feedback. In particular, clicks accurately indicate relative feedback of the kind “for query Q, document A should be ranked higher than document B”.

For this type of relative training data, we propose a Support Vector algorithm, called a Ranking SVM. Experiments show that the method can effectively adapt the retrieval function of a search engine to a particular group of users and to a particular document collection. For a focused group of users, the learned retrieval function outperformed Google in terms of retrieval quality after training on only a few hundred queries.

发言人详细信息

Thorsten Joachims is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University. In 2001, he finished his dissertation with the title “The Maximum-Margin Approach to Learning Text Classifiers: Methods, Theory, and Algorithms”, advised by Prof. Katharina Morik at the University of Dortmund. From there he also received his Diplom in Computer Science in 1997 with a thesis on WebWatcher, a browsing assistant for the Web. His research interests center on a synthesis of theory and system building in the field of machine learning, with a focus on Support Vector Machines and machine learning with text. He authors the SVM-Light algorithm and software for support vector learning. From 1994 to 1996 he was a visiting scientist at Carnegie Mellon University with Prof. Tom Mitchell.

日期：
演讲者：
Thorsten Joachims
所属机构：
Cornell University