Onur Gungor

Han Wang, Mukuntha Narayanan Sundararaman, Onur Gungor et al.

To improve relevance scoring on Pinterest Search, we integrate Large Language Models (LLMs) into our search relevance model, leveraging carefully designed text representations to predict the relevance of Pins effectively. Our approach uses search queries alongside content representations that include captions extracted from a generative visual language model. These are further enriched with link-based text data, historically high-quality engaged queries, user-curated boards, Pin titles and Pin descriptions, creating robust models for predicting search relevance. We use a semi-supervised learning approach to efficiently scale up the amount of training data, expanding beyond the expensive human labeled data available. By utilizing multilingual LLMs, our system extends training data to include unseen languages and domains, despite initial data and annotator expertise being confined to English. Furthermore, we distill from the LLM-based model into real-time servable model architectures and features. We provide comprehensive offline experimental validation for our proposed techniques and demonstrate the gains achieved through the final deployed system at scale.

Onur Gungor, Eray Yildiz, Suzan Uskudarli et al.

In this work, we present new state-of-the-art results of 93.59,% and 79.59,% for Turkish and Czech named entity recognition based on the model of (Lample et al., 2016). We contribute by proposing several schemes for representing the morphological analysis of a word in the context of named entity recognition. We show that a concatenation of this representation with the word and character embeddings improves the performance. The effect of these representation schemes on the tagging performance is also investigated.

Xueqing Liu, Chengxiang Zhai, Wei Han et al.

Faceted navigation is a very useful component in today's search engines. It is especially useful when user has an exploratory information need or prefer certain attribute values than others. Existing work has tried to optimize faceted systems in many aspects, but little work has been done on optimizing numerical facet ranges (e.g., price ranges of product). In this paper, we introduce for the first time the research problem on numerical facet range partition and formally frame it as an optimization problem. To enable quantitative evaluation of a partition algorithm, we propose an evaluation metric to be applied to search engine logs. We further propose two range partition algorithms that computationally optimize the defined metric. Experimental results on a two-month search log from a major e-Commerce engine show that our proposed method can significantly outperform baseline.