Learning to Recommend Related Entities to Search Users

Abstract

Over the past few years, major web search engines have introduced knowledge bases to offer popular facts about people, places, and things on the entity pane next to regular search results. In addition to information about the entity searched by the user, the entity pane often provides a ranked list of related entities. To keep users engaged, it is important to develop a recommendation model that tailors the related entities to individual user interests. We propose a probabilistic Three-way Entity Model (TEM) that provides personalized recommendation of related entities using three data sources: knowledge base, search click log, and entity pane log. Specifically, TEM is capable of extracting hidden structures and capturing underlying correlations among users, main entities, and related entities. Moreover, the TEM model can also exploit the click signals derived from the entity pane log. We further provide an inference technique to learn the parameters in TEM, and propose a principled preference learning method specifically designed for ranking related entities. Extensive experiments with two real-world datasets show that TEM with our probabilistic framework significantly outperforms a state of the art baseline, confirming the effectiveness of TEM and our probabilistic framework in related entity recommendation.