Search results personalization has become an effective way to improve the quality of search engines. Previous studies extracted information such as past clicks, user topical interests, query click entropy and so on to tailor the original ranking. However, few studies have taken into account the sequential information underlying previous queries and sessions. Intuitively, the order of issued queries is important in inferring the real user interests. And more recent sessions should provide more reliable personal signals than older sessions. In addition, the previous search history and user behaviors should influence the personalization of the current query depending on their relatedness. To implement these intuitions, in this paper we employ a hierarchical recurrent neural network to exploit such sequential information and automatically generate user profile from historical data. We propose a query-aware attention model to generate a dynamic user profile based on the input query. Significant improvement is observed in the experiment with data from a commercial search engine when compared with several traditional personalization models. Our analysis reveals that the attention model is able to attribute higher weights to more related past sessions after fine training.
Politecnico di Milano（米兰理工大学）；Telefonica Research（西班牙电信研究）；Gravity R&D（Gravity研发公司）
Session-based recommendations are highly relevant in many modern on-line services (e.g. e-commerce, video streaming) and recommendation settings. Recently, Recurrent Neural Networks have been shown to perform very well in session-based settings. While in many session-based recommendation domains user identifiers are hard to come by, there are also domains in which user profiles are readily available. We propose a seamless way to personalize RNN models with cross-session information transfer and devise a Hierarchical RNN model that relays end evolves latent hidden states of the RNNs across user…
In fashion e-commerce platforms, product discovery is one of the key components of a good user experience. There are numerous ways using which people find the products they desire. Similar product recommendations is one of the popular modes using which users find products that resonate with their intent. Generally these recommendations are not personalized to a specific user. Traditionally, collaborative filtering based approaches have been popular in the literature for recommending non-personalized products given a query product. Also, there has been focus on personalizing the product listing…
What if Information Retrieval (IR) systems did not just retrieve relevant information that is stored in their indices, but could also "understand" it and synthesise it into a single document? We present a preliminary study that makes a first step towards answering this question. Given a query, we train a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) on existing relevant information to that query. We then use the RNN to "deep learn" a single, synthetic, and we assume, relevant document for that query. We design a crowdsourcing experiment to assess how relevant the "deep learned" document is, compared to exist…
Query suggestions help users of a search engine to refine their queries. Previous work on query suggestion has mainly focused on incorporating directly observable features such as query co-occurrence and semantic similarity. The structure of such features is often set manually, as a result of which hidden dependencies between queries and users may be ignored. We propose an AHNQS model that combines a hierarchical structure with a session-level neural network and a user-level neural network to model the short- and long-term search history of a user. An attention mechanism is used to capture use…
Prior work on personalizing web search results has focused on considering query-and-click logs to capture users individual interests. For product search, extensive user histories about purchases and ratings have been exploited. However, for general entity search, such as for books on specific topics or travel destinations with certain features, personalization is largely underexplored. In this paper, we address personalization of book search, as an exemplary case of entity search, by exploiting sparse user profiles obtained through online questionnaires. We devise and compare a variety of re-r…
University of Southern California（南加州大学）；Information Sciences Institute（信息科学研究所）
The social media site Flickr allows users to upload their photos, annotate them with tags, submit them to groups, and also to form social networks by adding other users as contacts. Flickr offers multiple ways of browsing or searching it. One option is tag search, which returns all images tagged with a specific keyword. If the keyword is ambiguous, e.g., ``beetle'' could mean an insect or a car, tag search results will include many images that are not relevant to the sense the user had in mind when executing the query. We claim that users express their photography interests through the metadat…
University of Surrey（萨里大学）；Adobe Research（Adobe研究院）
LiveSketch is a novel algorithm for searching large image collections using hand-sketched queries. LiveSketch tackles the inherent ambiguity of sketch search by creating visual suggestions that augment the query as it is drawn, making query specification an iterative rather than one-shot process that helps disambiguate users' search intent. Our technical contributions are: a triplet convnet architecture that incorporates an RNN based variational autoencoder to search for images using vector (stroke-based) queries; real-time clustering to identify likely search intents (and so, targets within t…
We address the problem of personalizing query completion in a digital commerce setting, in which the bounce rate is typically high and recurring users are rare. We focus on in-session personalization and improve a standard noisy channel model by injecting dense vectors computed from product images at query time. We argue that image-based personalization displays several advantages over alternative proposals (from data availability to business scalability), and provide quantitative evidence and qualitative support on the effectiveness of the proposed methods. Finally, we show how a shared vecto…
End-to-end (E2E) systems have achieved competitive results compared to conventional hybrid hidden Markov model (HMM)-deep neural network based automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. Such E2E systems are attractive due to the lack of dependence on alignments between input acoustic and output grapheme or HMM state sequence during training. This paper explores the design of an ASR-free end-to-end system for text query-based keyword search (KWS) from speech trained with minimal supervision. Our E2E KWS system consists of three sub-systems. The first sub-system is a recurrent neural network (R…
University of British Columbia（不列颠哥伦比亚大学）；Microsoft Research（微软研究院）
This paper develops a model that addresses sentence embedding, a hot topic in current natural language processing research, using recurrent neural networks with Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) cells. Due to its ability to capture long term memory, the LSTM-RNN accumulates increasingly richer information as it goes through the sentence, and when it reaches the last word, the hidden layer of the network provides a semantic representation of the whole sentence. In this paper, the LSTM-RNN is trained in a weakly supervised manner on user click-through data logged by a commercial web search engine. V…
Multiple content providers rely on native advertisement for revenue by placing ads within the organic content of their pages. We refer to this setting as ``queryless'' to differentiate from search advertisement where a user submits a search query and gets back related ads. Understanding user intent is critical because relevant ads improve user experience and increase the likelihood of delivering clicks that have value to our advertisers. This paper presents Multi-Channel Sequential Behavior Network (MC-SBN), a deep learning approach for embedding users and ads in a semantic space in which rele…
Recent years have seen a significant amount of interests in Sequential Recommendation (SR), which aims to understand and model the sequential user behaviors and the interactions between users and items over time. Surprisingly, despite the huge success Sequential Recommendation has achieved, there is little study on Sequential Search (SS), a twin learning task that takes into account a user's current and past search queries, in addition to behavior on historical query sessions. The SS learning task is even more important than the counterpart SR task for most of E-commence companies due to its m…
Beyond Retrieval: Learning Compact User Representations for Scalable LLM Personalization
Microsoft（微软公司）；Shanghai International Studies University（上海国际问题研究大学）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；Department of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（数据科学与人工智能系，香港理工大学）
