Exploiting ranking factorization machines for microblog retrieval

Learning to rank method has been proposed for practical application in the field of information retrieval. When employing it in microblog retrieval, the significant interactions of various involved features are rarely considered. In this paper, we propose a Ranking Factorization Machine (Ranking FM) model, which applies Factorization Machine model to microblog ranking on basis of pairwise classification. In this way, our proposed model combines the generality of learning to rank framework with the advantages of factorization models in estimating interactions between features, leading to better retrieval performance. Moreover, three groups of features (content relevance features, semantic expansion features and quality features) and their interactions are utilized in the Ranking FM model with the methods of stochastic gradient descent and adaptive regularization for optimization. Experimental results demonstrate its superiority over several baseline systems on a real Twitter dataset in terms of P@30 and MAP metrics. Furthermore, it outperforms the best performing results in the TREC'12 Real-Time Search Task.