Learning to rank with cross entropy

Abstract

Learning to rank algorithms are usually grouped into three types: the point wise approach, the pairwise approach, and the listwise approach, according to the input spaces. Much of the prior work is based on the three approaches to learn the ranking model to predict the relevance of a document to a query. In this paper, we focus on the problem of constructing new input space based on groups of documents with the same relevance judgment. A novel approach is proposed based on cross entropy to improve the existing ranking method. The experimental results show that our approach leads to significant improvements in retrieval effectiveness.