Chris Leggetter

The sum of its parts: reducing sparsity in click estimation with query segments

The critical task of predicting clicks on search advertisements is typically addressed by learning from historical click data. When enough history is observed for a given query-ad pair, future clicks can be accurately modeled. However, based on the empirical distribution of queries, sufficient historical information is unavailable for many query-ad pairs. The sparsity of data for new and rare queries makes it difficult to accurately estimate clicks for a significant portion of typical search engine traffic. In this paper we provide analysis to motivate modeling approaches that can reduce the sparsity of the large space of user search queries. We then propose methods to improve click and relevance models for sponsored search by mining click behavior for partial user queries. We aggregate click history for individual query words, as well as for phrases extracted with a CRF model. The new models show significant improvement in clicks and revenue compared to state-of-the-art baselines trained on several months of query logs. Results are reported on live traffic of a commercial search engine, in addition to results from offline evaluation.

Transitive history-based query disambiguation for query reformulation

We present a probabilistic model of a users search history and a target query reformulation. We derive a simple transitive similarity algorithm for disambiguating queries and improving history-based query reformulation accuracy. We compare the merits of this approach to other methods and present results on both examples assessed by human editors and on automatically-labeled click data.

Clicked phrase document expansion for sponsored search ad retrieval

We present a document expansion approach that uses Conditional Random Field (CRF) segmentation to automatically extract salient phrases from ad titles. We then supplement the ad document with query segments that are probable translations of the document phrases, as learned from a large commercial search engines click logs. Our approach provides a significant improvement in DCG and interpolated precision and recall on a large set of human labeled query-ad pairs.