EENMF: An End-to-End Neural Matching Framework for E-Commerce Sponsored Search

E-commerce sponsored search contributes an important part of revenue for the e-commerce company. In consideration of effectiveness and efficiency, a large-scale sponsored search system commonly adopts a multi-stage architecture. We name these stages as ad retrieval, ad pre-ranking and ad ranking. Ad retrieval and ad pre-ranking are collectively referred to as ad matching in this paper. We propose an end-to-end neural matching framework (EENMF) to model two tasks---vector-based ad retrieval and neural networks based ad pre-ranking. Under the deep matching framework, vector-based ad retrieval harnesses user recent behavior sequence to retrieve relevant ad candidates without the constraint of keyword bidding. Simultaneously, the deep model is employed to perform the global pre-ranking of ad candidates from multiple retrieval paths effectively and efficiently. Besides, the proposed model tries to optimize the pointwise cross-entropy loss which is consistent with the objective of predict models in the ranking stage. We conduct extensive evaluation to validate the performance of the proposed framework. In the real traffic of a large-scale e-commerce sponsored search, the proposed approach significantly outperforms the baseline.

Beyond Keywords and Relevance: A Personalized Ad Retrieval Framework in E-Commerce Sponsored Search

On most sponsored search platforms, advertisers bid on some keywords for their advertisements (ads). Given a search request, ad retrieval module rewrites the query into bidding keywords, and uses these keywords as keys to select Top N ads through inverted indexes. In this way, an ad will not be retrieved even if queries are related when the advertiser does not bid on corresponding keywords. Moreover, most ad retrieval approaches regard rewriting and ad-selecting as two separated tasks, and focus on boosting relevance between search queries and ads. Recently, in e-commerce sponsored search more and more personalized information has been introduced, such as user profiles, long-time and real-time clicks. Personalized information makes ad retrieval able to employ more elements (e.g. real-time clicks) as search signals and retrieval keys, however it makes ad retrieval more difficult to measure ads retrieved through different signals. To address these problems, we propose a novel ad retrieval framework beyond keywords and relevance in e-commerce sponsored search. Firstly, we employ historical ad click data to initialize a hierarchical network representing signals, keys and ads, in which personalized information is introduced. Then we train a model on top of the hierarchical network by learning the weights of edges. Finally we select the best edges according to the model, boosting RPM/CTR. Experimental results on our e-commerce platform demonstrate that our ad retrieval framework achieves good performance.