Beyond Bag-of-Words: Machine Learning for Query-Document Matching in Web Search

摘要

In web search, relevance is one of the most important factors to meet users' satisfaction, and the success of a web search engine heavily depends on its performance on relevance. It has been observed that many hard cases in search relevance are due to term mismatch between query and document (e.g., query 'ny times' does not match well with document only containing 'new york times'), and thus it is not exaggerated to say that dealing with mismatch between query and document is one of the most critical research problems in web search. Recently researchers have spent significant effort to address the grand challenge. The major approach is to conduct more query and document understanding, and perform better matching between enriched query and document representations. With the availability of large amount of log data and advanced machine learning techniques, this becomes more feasible and significant progress has been made recently.