Learning to rank for information retrieval

This tutorial is concerned with a comprehensive introduction to the research area of learning to rank for information retrieval. In the first part of the tutorial, we will introduce three major approaches to learning to rank, i.e., the pointwise, pairwise, and listwise approaches, analyze the relationship between the loss functions used in these approaches and the widely-used IR evaluation measures, evaluate the performance of these approaches on the LETOR benchmark datasets, and demonstrate how to use these approaches to solve real ranking applications. In the second part of the tutorial, we will discuss some advanced topics regarding learning to rank, such as relational ranking, diverse ranking,…