Collection Construction Methodologies for Learning-to-Rank
Award: |
|
NSF IIS-1017903 |
PI: |
|
Javed A. Aslam |
Institution: |
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Northeastern University |
Summary
Modern search engines, especially those designed for the World Wide
Web, commonly analyze and combine hundreds of features extracted from
the submitted query and underlying documents (e.g., web pages) in
order to assess the relative relevance of a document to a given query
and thus rank the underlying collection. The sheer size of this
problem has led to the development of learning-to-rank algorithms that
can automate the construction of such ranking functions: Given a
training set of (feature vector, relevance) pairs, a machine learning
procedure learns how to combine the query and document features in
such a way so as to effectively assess the relevance of any document
to any query and thus rank a collection in response to a user
input. Much thought and research has been placed on feature extraction
and the development of sophisticated learning-to-rank
algorithms. However, relatively little research has been conducted on
the choice of documents and queries for learning-to-rank data sets nor
on the effect of these choices on the ability of a learning-to-rank
algorithm to "learn", effectively and efficiently.
The proposed work investigates the effect of query, document, and
feature selection on the ability of learning-to-rank algorithms to
efficiently and effectively learn ranking functions. In preliminary
results on document selection, a pilot study has already determined
that training sets whose sizes are as small as 2 to 5% of those
typically used are just as effective for learning-to-rank
purposes. Thus, one can train more efficiently over a much smaller
(though effectively equivalent) data set, or, at an equal cost, one
can train over a far "larger" and more representative data set. In
addition to formally characterizing this phenomenon for document
selection, the proposed work investigates this phenomenon for query and
feature selection as well, with the end goals of (1) understanding the
effect of document, query, and feature selection on learning-to-rank
algorithms and (2) developing collection construction methodologies
that are efficient and effective for learning-to-rank purposes.
Personnel
Former Personnel
- Keshi Dai (now at Intent Media, New York City)
- Shahzad Rajput (a Fulbright student, pursuing academic positions in his home country of Pakistan)
- Stefan Savev (now at Microsoft Research, Advanced Technology Labs Europe)
Publications
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A Modification of LambdaMART to Handle Noisy Crowdsourced Assessments
In Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on the Theory of Information Retrieval (ICTIR), page 31. ACM Press, September 2013.
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Optimizing nDCG Gains by Minimizing Effect of Label Inconsistency
In Advances in Information Retrieval: 35th European Conference on IR Research (ECIR), pages 760-763. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 7814. Springer-Verlag, March 2013.
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Impact of Assessor Disagreement on Ranking Performance
In Proceedings of the 35th Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, pages 1091-1092. ACM Press, August 2012.
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IR System Evaluation using Nugget-based Test Collections
In Proceedings of the Fifth ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM), pages 393-402. ACM Press, February 2012.
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A Nugget-based Test Collection Construction Paradigm
In Proceedings of the 20th ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM), pages 1945-1948. ACM Press, October 2011.
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A Large-scale Study of the Effect of Training Set Characteristics over Learning-to-rank Algorithms
In Proceedings of the 34th Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, pages 1243-1244. ACM Press, July 2011.
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Constructing Collections for Learning to Rank
In Proceedings of the 11th Dutch-Belgian Information Retrieval Workshop (DIR), pages 62-63. February 2011.
Acknowledgment and Disclaimer
This material is based upon work supported by the National Science
Foundation under Grant
No. IIS-1017903.
Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in
this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily
reflect the views of the National Science Foundation (NSF).