Multi-task learning to rank for web search

Both the quality and quantity of training data have significant impact on the accuracy of rank functions in web search. With the global search needs, a commercial search engine is required to expand its well tailored service to small countries as well. Due to heterogeneous intrinsic of query intents and search results on different domains (i.e., for different languages and regions), it is difficult for a generic ranking function to satisfy all type of queries. Instead, each domain should use a specific well tailored ranking function. In order to train each ranking function for each domain with a scalable strategy, it is critical to leverage existing training data to enhance the ranking functions of those domains without sufficient training data. In this paper, we present a boosting framework for learning to rank in the multi-task learning context to attack this problem. In particular. we propose to learn non-parametric common structures adaptively from multiple tasks in a stage-wise way. An algorithm is developed to iteratively discover super-features that are effective for all the tasks. The estimation of the regression function for each task is then learned as linear combination of those super-features. We evaluate the accuracy of multi-task learning methods for web search ranking using data from multiple domains from a commercial search engine. Our results demonstrate that multi-task learning methods bring significant relevance improvements over existing baseline method. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.