Practical User Feedback-driven Internal Search Using Online Learning to Rank

Abstract

We present a system, Spoke, for creating and searching internal knowledge base (KB) articles for organizations. Spoke is available as a SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) product deployed across hundreds of organizations with a diverse set of domains. Spoke continually improves search quality using conversational user feedback which allows it to provide better search experience than standard information retrieval systems without encoding any explicit domain knowledge. We achieve this by using a real-time online learning-to-rank (L2R) algorithm that automatically customizes relevance scoring for each organization deploying Spoke by using a query similarity kernel. The focus of this paper is on incorporating practical considerations into our relevance scoring function and algorithm that make Spoke easy to deploy and suitable for handling events that naturally happen over the life-cycle of any KB deployment. We show that Spoke outperforms competitive baselines by up to 41% in offline F1 comparisons.