RLPer: A reinforcement learning model for personalized search

Personalized search improves generic ranking models by taking user interests into consideration and returning more accurate search results to individual users. In recent years, machine learning and deep learning techniques have been successfully applied in personalized search. Most existing personalization models simply regard the search history as a static set of user behaviours and learn fixed ranking strategies based on the recorded data. Though improvements have been observed, it is obvious that these methods ignore the dynamic nature of the search process: search is a sequence of interactions between the search engine and the user. During the search process, the user interests may dynamically change. It would be more helpful if a personalized search model could track the whole interaction process and update its ranking strategy continuously. In this paper, we propose a reinforcement learning based personalization model, referred to as RLPer, to track the sequential interactions between the users and search engine with a hierarchical Markov Decision Process (MDP). In RLPer, the search engine interacts with the user to update the underlying ranking model continuously with real-time feedback. And we design a feedback-aware personalized ranking component to catch the user’s feedback which has impacts on the user interest profile for the next query. Experimental results on the publicly available AOL search log verify that our proposed model can significantly outperform state-of-the-art personalized search models.