Incorporating non-sequential behavior into click models

Wang, Chao; Liu, Yiqun; Wang, Meng; Zhou, Ke; Nie, Jian Yun; Ma, Shaoping

Abstract

© 2015 ACM. Click-through information is considered as a valuable source of users' implicit relevance feedback. As user behavior is usually inuenced by a number of factors such as position, presentation style and site reputation, researchers have proposed a variety of assumptions (i.e. click models) to generate a reasonable estimation of result relevance. The construction of click models usually follow some hypotheses. For example, most existing click models follow the sequential examination hypothesis in which users examine results from top to bottom in a linear fashion. While these click models have been successful, many recent studies showed that there is a large proportion of non-sequential browsing (both examination and click) behaviors in Web search, which the previous models fail to cope with. In this paper, we investigate the problem of properly incorporating non-sequential behavior into click models. We firstly carry out a laboratory eye-tracking study to analyze user's non-sequential examination behavior and then propose a novel click model named Partially Sequential Click Model (PSCM) that captures the practical behavior of users. We compare PSCM with a number of existing click models using two real-world search engine logs. Experimental results show that PSCM outperforms other click models in terms of both predicting click behavior (perplexity) and estimating result relevance (NDCG and user preference test). We also publicize the implementations of PSCM and related datasets for possible future comparison studies.

Citation

Wang, C., Liu, Y., Wang, M., Zhou, K., Nie, J. Y., & Ma, S. (2015, August). Incorporating non-sequential behavior into click models. Presented at SIGIR '15: The 38th International ACM SIGIR conference on research and development in Information Retrieval, Santiago, Chile

• Presentation Conference Type: Edited Proceedings
• Conference Name: SIGIR '15: The 38th International ACM SIGIR conference on research and development in Information Retrieval
• Start Date: Aug 9, 2015
• End Date: Aug 13, 2015
• Acceptance Date: Apr 20, 2015
• Online Publication Date: Aug 9, 2015
• Publication Date: Aug 9, 2015
• Deposit Date: Sep 18, 2017
• Publisher: Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
• Volume: 2015-August
• Pages: 283-292
• Book Title: SIGIR '15 Proceedings of the 38th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval
• ISBN: 9781450336215
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/2766462.2767712
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1125889
• Publisher URL: https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=2766462.2767712