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An evolutionary strategy with machine learning for learning to rank in information retrieval

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Abstract

Learning to rank (LTR) is one of the problems attracting researchers in information retrieval (IR). The LTR problem refers to ranking the retrieved documents for users in search engines, question answering and product recommendation systems. There is a number of LTR approaches based on machine learning and computational intelligence techniques. Most existing LTR methods have limitations, such as being too slow or not being very effective or requiring a huge computer memory to operate. This paper proposes a LTR method that combines a \((1+1)\)-evolutionary strategy with machine learning. Three variants of the method are investigated: ES-Rank, IESR-Rank and IESVM-Rank. They differ on the chromosome initialisation mechanism for the evolutionary process. ES-Rank simply sets all genes in the initial chromosome to the same value. IESR-Rank uses linear regression, and IESVM-Rank uses support vector machine for the initialisation process. Experimental results from comparing the proposed method to fourteen other approaches from the literature show that IESR-Rank achieves the overall highest performance. Ten problem instances are used here, obtained from four datasets: MSLR-WEB10K, LETOR 3 and LETOR 4. Performance is measured at the top-10 query–document pairs retrieved, using five metrics: mean average precision (MAP), root-mean-square error (RMSE), precision (P@10), reciprocal rank (RR@10) and normalized discounted cumulative gain (NDCG@10). The contribution of this paper is proposing an effective and efficient LTR method combining a list-wise evolutionary technique with point-wise and pair-wise machine learning techniques.

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Acknowledgements

Osman Ibrahim would like to thank Minia University in Egypt for their support to pursue the research in this paper.

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Correspondence to Osman Ali Sadek Ibrahim.

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The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

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Communicated by P. Angelov, F. Chao.

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Ibrahim, O.A.S., Landa-Silva, D. An evolutionary strategy with machine learning for learning to rank in information retrieval. Soft Comput 22, 3171–3185 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00500-017-2988-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00500-017-2988-6

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