Recently, sponsored search has become one of the most lucrative channels for marketing. As the fundamental basis of sponsored search, relevance modeling has attracted increasing attention due to the tremendous practical value. Most existing methods solely rely on the query-keyword pairs. However, keywords are usually short texts with scarce semantic information, which may not precisely reflect the underlying advertising intents. In this paper, we investigate the novel problem of advertiser-aware relevance modeling, which leverages the advertisers’ information to bridge the gap between the search intents and advertising purposes. Our motivation lies in incorporating the unsupervised bidding behaviors as the complementary graphs to learn desirable advertiser representations. We further propose a Bidding-Graph augmented Triple-based Relevance model BGTR with three towers to deeply fuse the bidding graphs and semantic textual data. Empirically, we evaluate the BGTR model over a large industry dataset, and the experimental results consistently demonstrate its superiority.

In many languages, adverbials can be derived from words of various parts-of-speech. In Chinese, the derivation may be marked either with the standard adverbial marker DI, or the non-standard marker DE. Since DE also serves double duty as the attributive marker, accurate identification of adverbials requires disambiguation of its syntactic role. As parsers are trained predominantly on texts using the standard adverbial marker DI, they often fail to recognize adverbials suffixed with the non-standard DE. This paper addresses this problem with an unsupervised, rule-based approach for adverbial identification that utilizes dependency tree patterns. Experiment results show that this approach outperforms a masked language model baseline. We apply this approach to analyze standard and non-standard adverbial marker usage in modern Chinese literature.

We present Covidex, a search engine that exploits the latest neural ranking models to provide information access to the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset curated by the Allen Institute for AI. Our system has been online and serving users since late March 2020. The Covidex is the user application component of our three-pronged strategy to develop technologies for helping domain experts tackle the ongoing global pandemic. In addition, we provide robust and easy-to-use keyword search infrastructure that exploits mature fusion-based methods as well as standalone neural ranking models that can be incorporated into other applications. These techniques have been evaluated in the multi-round TREC-COVID challenge: Our infrastructure and baselines have been adopted by many participants, including some of the best systems. In round 3, we submitted the highest-scoring run that took advantage of previous training data and the second-highest fully automatic run. In rounds 4 and 5, we submitted the highest-scoring fully automatic runs.