Deeply Supervised Model for Click-through Rate Prediction in Sponsored Search

Publication
Apr 3, 2019
Abstract

In sponsored search it is critical to match ads that are relevant to a query and to accurately predict their likelihood of being clicked. Commercial search engines typically use machine learning models for both query-ad relevance matching and click-through-rate (CTR) prediction. However, matching models are based on the similarity between a query and an ad, ignoring the fact that a retrieved ad may not attract clicks, while click models rely on click history, limiting their use for new queries and ads. We propose a deeply supervised architecture that jointly learns the semantic embeddings of a query and an ad as well as their corresponding CTR. We also propose a novel cohort negative sampling technique for learning implicit negative signals. We trained the proposed architecture using one billion query-ad pairs from a major commercial web search engine. This architecture improves the best-performing baseline deep neural architectures by 2% of AUC for CTR prediction and by statistically significant 0.5% of NDCG for query-ad matching.

  • Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery (ECML 2019)
  • Journal

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