Yanfeng Zhu

Yijiang Lian, Shuang Li, Chaobing Feng et al.

Synonymous keyword retrieval has become an important problem for sponsored search ever since major search engines relax the exact match product's matching requirement to a synonymous level. Since the synonymous relations between queries and keywords are quite scarce, the traditional information retrieval framework is inefficient in this scenario. In this paper, we propose a novel quotient space-based retrieval framework to address this problem. Considering the synonymy among keywords as a mathematical equivalence relation, we can compress the synonymous keywords into one representative, and the corresponding quotient space would greatly reduce the size of the keyword repository. Then an embedding-based retrieval is directly conducted between queries and the keyword representatives. To mitigate the semantic gap of the quotient space-based retrieval, a single semantic siamese model is utilized to detect both the keyword--keyword and query-keyword synonymous relations. The experiments show that with our quotient space-based retrieval method, the synonymous keyword retrieving performance can be greatly improved in terms of memory cost and recall efficiency. This method has been successfully implemented in Baidu's online sponsored search system and has yielded a significant improvement in revenue.

Yijiang Lian, Yubo Liu, Zhicong Ye et al.

In sponsored search, retrieving synonymous keywords for exact match type is important for accurately targeted advertising. Data-driven deep learning-based method has been proposed to tackle this problem. An apparent disadvantage of this method is its poor generalization performance on entity-level long-tail instances, even though they might share similar concept-level patterns with frequent instances. With the help of a large knowledge base, we find that most commercial synonymous query-keyword pairs can be abstracted into meaningful conceptual patterns through concept tagging. Based on this fact, we propose a novel knowledge-driven conceptual retrieval framework to mitigate this problem, which consists of three parts: data conceptualization, matching via conceptual patterns and concept-augmented discrimination. Both offline and online experiments show that our method is very effective. This framework has been successfully applied to Baidu's sponsored search system, which yields a significant improvement in revenue.

Xiao Yang, Daren Sun, Ruiwei Zhu et al.

Sponsored search has more than 20 years of history, and it has been proven to be a successful business model for online advertising. Based on the pay-per-click pricing model and the keyword targeting technology, the sponsored system runs online auctions to determine the allocations and prices of search advertisements. In the traditional setting, advertisers should manually create lots of ad creatives and bid on some relevant keywords to target their audience. Due to the huge amount of search traffic and a wide variety of ad creations, the limits of manual optimizations from advertisers become the main bottleneck for improving the efficiency of this market. Moreover, as many emerging advertising forms and supplies are growing, it's crucial for sponsored search platform to pay more attention to the ROI metrics of ads for getting the marketing budgets of advertisers. In this paper, we present the AiAds system developed at Baidu, which use machine learning techniques to build an automated and intelligent advertising system. By designing and implementing the automated bidding strategy, the intelligent targeting and the intelligent creation models, the AiAds system can transform the manual optimizations into multiple automated tasks and optimize these tasks in advanced methods. AiAds is a brand-new architecture of sponsored search system which changes the bidding language and allocation mechanism, breaks the limit of keyword targeting with end-to-end ad retrieval framework and provides global optimization of ad creation. This system can increase the advertiser's campaign performance, the user experience and the revenue of the advertising platform simultaneously and significantly. We present the overall architecture and modeling techniques for each module of the system and share our lessons learned in solving several key challenges.