A Mouse-Trajectory Based Model for Predicting Query-URL Relevance

For the learning-to-ranking algorithms used in commercial search engines, a conventional way to generate the training examples is to employ professional annotators to label the relevance of query-url pairs. Since label quality depends on the expertise of annotators to a large extent, this process is time-consuming and labor-intensive. Automatically generating labels from click-through data has been well studied to have comparable or better performance than human judges. Click-through data present users’ action and imply their satisfaction on search results, but exclude the interactions between users and search results beyond the page-view level (e.g., eye and mouse movements). This paper proposes a novel approach to comprehensively consider the information underlying mouse trajectory and click-through data so as to describe user behaviors more objectively and achieve a better understanding of the user experience. By integrating multi-sources data, the proposed approach reveals that the relevance labels of query-url pairs are related to positions of urls and users’ behavioral features. Based on their correlations, query-url pairs can be labeled more accurately and search results are more satisfactory to users. The experiments that are conducted on the most popular Chinese commercial search engine (Baidu) validated the rationality of our research motivation and proved that the proposed approach outperformed the state-of-the-art methods.