Training Mixed-Objective Pointing Decoders for Block-Level Optimization in Search Recommendation

Abstract: Related or ideal follow-up suggestions to a web query in search engines are often optimized based on several different parameters -- relevance to the original query, diversity, click probability etc. One or many rankers may be trained to score each suggestion from a candidate pool based on these factors. These scorers are usually pairwise classification tasks where each training example consists of a user query and a single suggestion from the list of candidates. We propose an architecture that takes all candidate suggestions associated with a given query and outputs a suggestion block. We discuss the benefits of such an architecture over traditional approaches and experiment with further enforcing each individual metric through mixed-objective training.