Extracting search-focused key n-grams for relevance ranking in web search

  • Authors:

  • Chen Wang;Keping Bi;Yunhua Hu;Hang Li;Guihong Cao

  • Affiliations:

  • Fudan University, Shanghai, China;Peking University, Beijing, China;Microsoft Research Asia, Beijing, China;Microsoft Research Asia, Beijing, China;Microsoft Corporation, Redmond, WA, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the fifth ACM international conference on Web search and data mining
  • Year:
  • 2012

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

In web search, relevance ranking of popular pages is relatively easy, because of the inclusion of strong signals such as anchor text and search log data. In contrast, with less popular pages, relevance ranking becomes very challenging due to a lack of information. In this paper the former is referred to as head pages, and the latter tail pages. We address the challenge by learning a model that can extract search-focused key n-grams from web pages, and using the key n-grams for searches of the pages, particularly, the tail pages. To the best of our knowledge, this problem has not been previously studied. Our approach has four characteristics. First, key n-grams are search-focused in the sense that they are defined as those which can compose "good queries" for searching the page. Second, key n-grams are learned in a relative sense using learning to rank techniques. Third, key n-grams are learned using search log data, such that the characteristics of key n-grams in the search log data, particularly in the heads; can be applied to the other data, particularly to the tails. Fourth, the extracted key n-grams are used as features of the relevance ranking model also trained with learning to rank techniques. Experiments validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach with large-scale web search datasets. The results show that our approach can significantly improve relevance ranking performance on both heads and tails; and particularly tails, compared with baseline approaches. Characteristics of our approach have also been fully investigated through comprehensive experiments.