Search task success evaluation by exploiting multi-view active semi-supervised learning

Abstract

Search task success rate is an important indicator to measure the performance of search engines. In contrast to most of the previous approaches that rely on labeled search tasks provided by users or third-party editors, this paper attempts to improve the performance of search task success evaluation by exploiting unlabeled search tasks that are existing in search logs as well as a small amount of labeled ones. Concretely, the Multi-view Active Semi-Supervised Search task Success Evaluation (MA4SE) approach is proposed, which exploits labeled data and unlabeled data by integrating the advantages of both semi-supervised learning and active learning with the multi-view mechanism. In the semi-supervised learning part of MA4SE, we employ a multi-view semi-supervised learning approach that utilizes different parameter configurations to achieve the disagreement between base classifiers. The base classifiers are trained separately from the pre-defined action and time views. In the active learning part of MA4SE, each classifier received from semi-supervised learning is applied to unlabeled search tasks, and the search tasks that need to be manually annotated are selected based on both the degree of disagreement between base classifiers and a regional density measurement. We evaluate the proposed approach on open datasets with two different definitions of search tasks success. The experimental results show that MA4SE outperforms the state-of-the-art semi-supervised search task success evaluation approach.