language: en

Statistical Machine Translation Models for Personalized Search

Rohini U *
AOL India R& D
Bangalore, India
Rohini.uppuluri@corp.aol.com
Vamshi Ambati
Language Technologies Institute Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, USA
vamshi@cs.cmu.edu
Vasudeva Varma
LTRC, IIIT Hyd
Hyderabad, India
vv@iiit.ac.in

Abstract Web search personalization has been well studied in the recent few years. Relevance feedback has been used in various ways to improve relevance of search results. In this paper, we propose a novel usage of relevance feedback to effectively model the process of query formulation and better characterize how a user relates his query to the document that he intends to retrieve using a noisy channel model. We model a user profile as the probabilities of translation of query to document in this noisy channel using the relevance feedback obtained from the user. The user profile thus learnt is applied in a re-ranking phase to rescore the search results retrieved using an underlying search engine. We evaluate our approach by conducting experiments using relevance feedback data collected from users using a popular search engine. The results have shown improvement over baseline, proving that our approach can be applied to personalization of web search. The experiments have also resulted in some valuable observations that learning these user profiles using snippets surrounding the results for a query gives better performance than learning from entire document collection.

1 Introduction