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Fast Feature Selection for Learning to Rank

Published:12 September 2016Publication History

ABSTRACT

An emerging research area named Learning-to-Rank (LtR) has shown that effective solutions to the ranking problem can leverage machine learning techniques applied to a large set of features capturing the relevance of a candidate document for the user query. Large-scale search systems must however answer user queries very fast, and the computation of the features for candidate documents must comply with strict back-end latency constraints. The number of features cannot thus grow beyond a given limit, and Feature Selection (FS) techniques have to be exploited to find a subset of features that both meets latency requirements and leads to high effectiveness of the trained models. In this paper, we propose three new algorithms for FS specifically designed for the LtR context where hundreds of continuous or categorical features can be involved. We present a comprehensive experimental analysis conducted on publicly available LtR datasets and we show that the proposed strategies outperform a well-known state-of-the-art competitor.

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        cover image ACM Conferences
        ICTIR '16: Proceedings of the 2016 ACM International Conference on the Theory of Information Retrieval
        September 2016
        318 pages
        ISBN:9781450344975
        DOI:10.1145/2970398

        Copyright © 2016 ACM

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        Association for Computing Machinery

        New York, NY, United States

        Publication History

        • Published: 12 September 2016

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        ICTIR '16 Paper Acceptance Rate41of79submissions,52%Overall Acceptance Rate209of482submissions,43%

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