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Vertical Search Blending: A Real-world Counterfactual Dataset

Published:18 July 2019Publication History

ABSTRACT

Blending of search results from several vertical sources became standard among web search engines. Similar scenarios appear in computational advertising, news recommendation, and other interactive systems. As such environments give only partial feedback, the evaluation of new policies conventionally requires expensive online A/B tests. Counterfactual approach is a promising alternative, nevertheless, it requires specific conditions for a valid off-policy evaluation. We release a large-scale, real-world vertical-blending dataset gathered bySeznam.cz web search engine. The dataset contains logged partial feedback with the corresponding propensity and is thus suited for counterfactual evaluation. We provide basic checks for validity and evaluate several learning methods.

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          cover image ACM Conferences
          SIGIR'19: Proceedings of the 42nd International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval
          July 2019
          1512 pages
          ISBN:9781450361729
          DOI:10.1145/3331184

          Copyright © 2019 ACM

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          Publication History

          • Published: 18 July 2019

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          SIGIR'19 Paper Acceptance Rate84of426submissions,20%Overall Acceptance Rate792of3,983submissions,20%

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