Learning to Rank in Theory and Practice: From Gradient Boosting to Neural Networks and Unbiased Learning

This tutorial aims to weave together diverse strands of modern Learning to Rank (LtR) research, and present them in a unified full-day tutorial. First, we will introduce the fundamentals of LtR, and an overview of its various sub-fields. Then, we will discuss some recent advances in gradient boosting methods such as LambdaMART by focusing on their efficiency/effectiveness trade-offs and optimizations. Subsequently, we will then present TF-Ranking, a new open source TensorFlow package for neural LtR models, and how it can be used for modeling sparse textual features. Finally, we will conclude the tutorial by covering unbiased LtR – a new research field aiming at learning from biased implicit user feedback.

The tutorial will consist of three two-hour sessions, each focusing on one of the topics described above. It will provide a mix of theoretical and hands-on sessions, and should benefit both academics interested in learning more about the current state-of-the-art in LtR, as well as practitioners who want to use LtR techniques in their applications.

Download the paper here.

Download the presentation slides here.

Find the official tutorial website here.

Recommended citation:

C. Lucchese, F. M. Nardini, R. K. Pasumarthi, S. Bruch, M. Bendersky, X. Wang, H. Oosterhuis, R. Jagerman, M. de Rijke. "Learning to Rank in Theory and Practice: From Gradient Boosting to Neural Networks and Unbiased Learning." In Proceedings of the 42nd International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval. ACM, 2019.