A relevance model based filter for improving ad quality

Recently there has been a surge in research that predicts retrieval relevance using historical click-through data. While a larger number of clicks between a query and a document provides a stronger ``confidence" of relevance, most models in the literature that learn from clicks are error-prone as they do not take into account any confidence estimates. Sponsored Search models are especially prone to this error as they are typically trained on search engine logs in order to predict click-through-rate (CTR). The estimated CTR ultimately determines the rank at which an ad is shown and also impacts the price (cost-per-click) for the advertiser. In this paper, we improve a model that applies collaborative filtering on click data by training a filter that has been trained to predict pure relevance. Applying the filter to ads that have seen few clicks on live traffic results in improved CTR and click-yield (CY). Additionally, in offline experiments we find that using features based on the \emph{organic} results improves the relevance based filter's performance.