The present invention relates generally to online advertising and more particularly to mapping a user query to a most relevant bidword.
In online advertising one of the objectives is for advertisers to put their advertisements in front of potential customers. In other words, online advertisers would like to place their advertisements or webpages where interested users will see them and have a chance to respond and purchase the advertised product or service.
There are many ways advertisers attempt to achieve their objective. One way is to use search queries to guess at a user's interest and then put an appropriate advertisement or webpage in front of that user. One way that an advertiser may place its advertisement is through the use of bidwords.
In online advertising, bidwords are used by advertisers to promote their products or service. A bidword is a term, phrase, question, or sentence, e.g., “toy” or “what is the best toy,” that an advertiser may bid on and purchase. In prior art systems, when a user generates a query, for example, in a search engine, and a bidword is used, then the advertiser who owns that exact bidword may place their advertisement in front of the user in response to the user query.
For example, a toy company might own the bidwords “toy” and “what is the best toy.” That toy company may then place its advertisements in front of the user when the user does a search for “toy” or “what is the best toy.” However, if a user searches for “best child educational product,” the advertiser will not place its advertisement, unless it also owns that bidword.
The prior art solutions must have an exact match between bidword and query terms in order to trigger advertisement or webpage placement. If a search query is close, but not an exact match to one or more bidwords, the advertisement will not be placed.
Accordingly, what is needed is systems and methods to perform mapping between search query terms and bidwords in such a way as to maximize click through rate.
Reference will be made to embodiments of the invention, examples of which may be illustrated in the accompanying figures, in which like parts may be referred to by like or similar numerals. These figures are intended to be illustrative, not limiting. Although the invention is generally described in the context of these embodiments, it should be understood that it is not intended to limit the spirit and scope of the invention to these particular embodiments. These drawings shall in no way limit any changes in form and detail that may be made to the invention by one skilled in the art without departing from the spirit and scope of the invention.
In the following description, for purposes of explanation, specific details are set forth in order to provide an understanding of the invention. It will be apparent, however, to one skilled in the art that the invention can be practiced without these details. Furthermore, one skilled in the art will recognize that embodiments of the present invention, described below, may be implemented in a variety of ways, such as a process, an apparatus, a system, a device, or a method on a tangible computer-readable medium.
Components, or modules, shown in diagrams are illustrative of exemplary embodiments of the invention and are meant to avoid obscuring the invention. It shall also be understood that throughout this discussion that components may be described as separate functional units, which may comprise sub-units, but those skilled in the art will recognize that various components, or portions thereof, may be divided into separate components or may be integrated together, including integrated within a single system or component. It should be noted that functions or operations discussed herein may be implemented as components. Components may be implemented in software, hardware, or a combination thereof.
Furthermore, connections between components or systems within the figures are not intended to be limited to direct connections. Rather, data between these components may be modified, re-formatted, or otherwise changed by intermediary components. Also, additional or fewer connections may be used. It shall also be noted that the terms “coupled,” “connected,” or “communicatively coupled” shall be understood to include direct connections, indirect connections through one or more intermediary devices, and wireless connections.
Reference in the specification to “one embodiment,” “preferred embodiment,” “an embodiment,” or “embodiments” means that a particular feature, structure, characteristic, or function described in connection with the embodiment is included in at least one embodiment of the invention and may be in more than one embodiment. Also, the appearances of the above-noted phrases in various places in the specification are not necessarily all referring to the same embodiment or embodiments.
The use of certain terms in various places in the specification is for illustration and should not be construed as limiting. A service, function, or resource is not limited to a single service, function, or resource; usage of these terms may refer to a grouping of related services, functions, or resources, which may be distributed or aggregated. Furthermore, the use of memory, database, information base, data store, tables, hardware, and the like may be used herein to refer to system component or components into which information may be entered or otherwise recorded. Furthermore, the use of certain terms in various places in the specification is for illustration and should not be construed as limiting. Any headings used herein are for organizational purposes only and shall not be used to limit the scope of the description or the claims. Each reference mentioned in this patent document is incorporate by reference herein in its entirety.
It shall be noted that: (1) certain steps may optionally be performed; (2) steps may not be limited to the specific order set forth herein; (3) certain steps may be performed in different orders; and (4) certain steps may be done concurrently.
The present invention relates in various embodiments to devices, systems, methods, and instructions stored on one or more non-transitory computer-readable media involving attention-based models. Such devices, systems, methods, and instructions stored on one or more non-transitory computer-readable media can result in, among other advantages, the prediction of click through rates correlating a query to bidwords.
It shall also be noted that although embodiments described herein may be within the context of correlating a query with bidwords, the invention elements of the current patent document are not so limited. Accordingly, the invention elements may be applied or adapted for use in other contexts.
In online advertising one of the objectives is for advertisers to put their advertisements or their webpages in front of potential customers. In other words, online advertisers would like to place their advertisements or web pages where interested people will see them and have a chance to respond and purchase the advertised product or service.
There are many ways advertisers attempt to achieve their objective. One way is to use search queries to guess at a user's interest and then put an appropriate advertisement in front of that user. One way that an advertiser may place its advertisement is through the use of bidwords. A bidword is a term, phrase, question, or sentence, e.g., “toy” or “what is the best toy,” that an advertiser can bid on and purchase.
In embodiments, a bidword that is not an exact match to a search query can trigger the advertisement placement associated with the bidword. In embodiments, the systems and methods described herein can rank bidwords based on predicted click through rate (CRT) and use the highest ranked bidword to return an advertisement or webpage from a particular search query. CRT is a ratio of users who click on a specific link to the number of total users who view a certain webpage. Suggesting proper bidwords to the corresponding query can significantly improve webpage clickability and conversion rates.
In embodiments, the systems and methods described herein suggest relevant bidwords to a user query. In embodiments, the attention-based model makes it possible to reveal which words in the search query contribute the most to the final providing bidword. That prediction can help advertisers better understand their users' attention.
The system of embodiments described herein improves on the prior art advertising system by providing systems and methods to map a query to a bidword and to determine which keywords in the query contribute most to the final providing bidword, which will help advertisers better understand their users' attention. Linking high quality bidwords to the user query leads to improved advertisement clickability and increased conversion rates. The market size is tens of millions of dollars.
In embodiments, in order to use an attention-based model to predict CTR for each query-bidword pair, the model can be trained to learn user behavior. The learning system architecture is shown in
In embodiments, vector representation generator 115 converts a word (either a query word or a bidword) into a vector representation. The vector representation generator 115 may use any method for achieving a vector representation. Various methods for vector representation include, but are not limited to, Skip-gram model or continuous bag of words (Word2Vec), GloVe, one-hot-representation, or other word embedding representation.
Vector representation generator 115 takes words as an input and outputs a 1×D vector representation. In embodiments, a bidword is represented as a single 1×D vector.
Vector representation generator 115 represents words in a continuous vector space where semantically similar words are mapped to nearby points. In embodiments, vector representations use a notion that words that appear in the same contexts share semantic meaning.
The Word2Vec method uses a group of models to produce word embedding. These models may be shallow, two-layer neural networks that are trained to reconstruct linguistic contexts of words.
GloVe is an unsupervised learning algorithm for obtaining vector representations of words.
One-hot-representation assigns each word in the vocabulary a number and represents the number by using all zeros and a “1” to indicate the position associated with the number associated with the word.
The attention-based mode 130 assigns each word a probability and combines the probabilities into a weighted probability.
In embodiments, query words q1, q2, q3, qN are used, which are acquired after word segmentation from the query. Each representation is a 1×D vector. In embodiments, one-word embedding representation of bidword, b, which is a 1×D vector is used. In embodiments, a CTR value, c, for the corresponding query and bidword is also used.
Embodiments may use the function:
Minp
Where pi=Wp*(qi+b) is the probability assigned for each query word; Wp is a D by 1 matrix which projects the combined representation Pi=Wp*(qi+b) from D dimension into 1; Wp is a matrix measuring the relationship between each query word and bidword. Thus, as the formula shows, the model learns a probability, pi, for each query word corresponding to the bidword (that is the reason pi is calculated on both qi and b). The representation may be weighted and combined to make a regression on the CTR, c, via a normal. In embodiments, all the parameters used to learn pi, W, and Wp can be achieved by the above formula via gradient descent.
In embodiments, the weighted probability is the CTR prediction. Using the architecture of
A query can be a single word or a phrase. In some languages, a query input A/B/C/D 305 may be input into a segment module 310. Segment module 310 segments the query into its components A, B, C, and D 315. Mapping 320 is used to compare the query to the list of bidwords 325 and predict CTR 330. Mapping 320 may use an attention-based model as described in relation to
In the prior art systems and methods, mapping was only capable of being a direct comparison. Therefore, if the query word 315 was exactly a bidword on bidword list 325, then the bidword would be returned. However, in embodiments, a bidword may be returned based on predicted CTR even when the query word 315 is not an exact match to the bidword on bidword list 325.
For example, a search query can be the phrase “a toy for my son.” That search query may be segmented into words, “a,” “toy,” “for,” “my,” and “son.” Each word would be mapped to a bidword, even if there is no exact match with a bidword. In embodiments, the bidwords may be scored based on a CTR prediction.
Vector representation generator 425 takes words as an input. Vector representation generator 425 outputs a vector representation. Vector representation generator 425 represents words in a continuous vector space where semantically similar words are mapped to nearby points. In embodiments, vector representations use a notion that words that appear in the same contexts share semantic meaning.
The Word2Vec method uses a group of models to produce word embedding. These models may be shallow, two-layer neural networks that are trained to reconstruct linguistic contexts of words.
GloVe is an unsupervised learning algorithm for obtaining vector representations of words.
One-hot-representation assigns each word in the vocabulary a number and represents the number by using all zeros and a one to indicate the position associated with the number associated with the word.
In embodiments, a bidword vector representation is a single bidword vector representation. In embodiments, the single bidword representation may computed by using a vector representation of each word in the bidword and taking an average of those vector representations. In embodiments, the single bidword representation may be achieved using a recurrent neural network (RNN).
Once the model has been well trained, the input may be the query word or words and a bidword and the corresponding CTR value may be predicted using the below formula:
prediction=W((ΣiNpi*qi)+b) (2)
In embodiments, the attention-based mode 450 assigns each word a probability and combines the probabilities into a weighted probability. In embodiments, the weighted probability is the CTR prediction.
Using the architecture of
Applying, the example above with reference to
Vector representations for word 1430, word 2435, word 3, word 4, word 5, word 6, and a bidword combination 445 may be used as inputs to an attention-based model 450. In embodiments, the attention-based model 450 assigns a probability to each vector representation for each word. In embodiments, the attention-based model 450 also combines the probabilities into one score, which is the CTR prediction for that query-bidword pair.
In embodiments, the CTR prediction is used by bidword selector 460 to select top scoring bidwords. In embodiments, the top scoring bidwords can be used by page returner 465 to determine advertisements or webpages to return to the user in response to the query based on the top scoring bidwords. Since the CTR has been predicted, using the top scoring bidwords to return the advertisements or webpages, will increase the CTR of the search results.
The attention-based model may be run iteratively on other bidwords to predict a score for other bidwords with that particular query. One of ordinary skill in the art will appreciate that the above example is intended to be an example only and not be limiting.
Probability predictor 520 assigns each word a probability association with a particular bidword. Probability predictor outputs a probability associated with each word 525, 530, and 535. Each probability 525, 530, and 535 is input to a combiner 540. Combiner 540 takes a weighted combination of the probabilities to output a single probability or CTR. The single probability represents the click through rate for the query (the set of words input to the attention-based model) with a particular bidword or bidword combination. The attention-based model may be run with respect to a plurality of bidwords or bidword combinations to determine the highest rated bidword or bidwords.
Combiner 540 may perform any combination of the probabilities. In embodiments, a weighted average is used. In other embodiments, recurrent neural network (RNN) learning is used to combine the probabilities.
In embodiments, the output of the combiner is a CTR prediction. The CTR prediction may be used to place an advertisement or webpage in response to a search query. A set of top scoring bidwords may be identified based on CRT prediction. The highest scoring bidwords may be used to place the advertisement or webpage. For example, in the example above, the bidword might be “boys toys.” The bidword “boys toys” has an owner with a corresponding advertisement or webpage that may be placed in response to the query “a toy for my son.”
Again, returning to the above example, in embodiments, webpages may be returned based on possible bidwords “boys toys,” “toy,” “kids toys,” if they score the highest in CTR prediction.
One of ordinary skill in the art will appreciate that various benefits are available as a result of the present invention.
One of ordinary skill in the art will appreciate that one benefit as a result of the present invention is the ability to rank bidwords based on predicted CTR and use the highest ranked bidwords to return an advertisement or webpage from a particular search query.
Aspects of the present patent document are directed to a computing system. For purposes of this disclosure, a computing system may include any instrumentality or aggregate of instrumentalities operable to compute, calculate, determine, classify, process, transmit, receive, retrieve, originate, route, store, display, communicate, manifest, detect, record, reproduce, handle, or utilize any form of information, intelligence, or data for business, scientific, control, or other purposes. For example, a computing may be a personal computer (e.g., desktop or laptop), tablet computer, mobile device (e.g., personal digital assistant (PDA) or smart phone), server (e.g., blade server or rack server), a network device, or any other suitable device and may vary in size, shape, performance, functionality, and price. The computing system may include random access memory (RAM), one or more processing resources such as a central processing unit (CPU) or hardware or software control logic, ROM, and/or other types of memory. Additional components of the computing system may include one or more disk drives, one or more network ports for communicating with external devices as well as various input and output (I/O) devices, such as a keyboard, a mouse, touchscreen and/or a video display. The computing system may also include one or more buses operable to transmit communications between the various hardware components.
A number of controllers and peripheral devices may also be provided, as shown in
In the illustrated system, all major system components may connect to a bus 716, which may represent more than one physical bus. However, various system components may or may not be in physical proximity to one another. For example, input data and/or output data may be remotely transmitted from one physical location to another. In addition, programs that implement various aspects of this invention may be accessed from a remote location (e.g., a server) over a network. Such data and/or programs may be conveyed through any of a variety of machine-readable medium including, but are not limited to: magnetic media such as hard disks, floppy disks, and magnetic tape; optical media such as CD-ROMs and holographic devices; magneto-optical media; and hardware devices that are specially configured to store or to store and execute program code, such as application specific integrated circuits (ASICs), programmable logic devices (PLDs), flash memory devices, and ROM and RAM devices.
Embodiments of the present invention may be encoded upon one or more non-transitory computer-readable media with instructions for one or more processors or processing units to cause steps to be performed. It shall be noted that the one or more non-transitory computer-readable media shall include volatile and non-volatile memory. It shall be noted that alternative implementations are possible, including a hardware implementation or a software/hardware implementation. Hardware-implemented functions may be realized using ASIC(s), programmable arrays, digital signal processing circuitry, or the like. Accordingly, the “means” terms in any claims are intended to cover both software and hardware implementations. Similarly, the term “computer-readable medium or media” as used herein includes software and/or hardware having a program of instructions embodied thereon, or a combination thereof. With these implementation alternatives in mind, it is to be understood that the figures and accompanying description provide the functional information one skilled in the art would require to write program code (i.e., software) and/or to fabricate circuits (i.e., hardware) to perform the processing required.
It shall be noted that embodiments of the present invention may further relate to computer products with a non-transitory, tangible computer-readable medium that have computer code thereon for performing various computer-implemented operations. The media and computer code may be those specially designed and constructed for the purposes of the present invention, or they may be of the kind known or available to those having skill in the relevant arts. Examples of tangible computer-readable media include, but are not limited to: magnetic media such as hard disks, floppy disks, and magnetic tape; optical media such as CD-ROMs and holographic devices; magneto-optical media; and hardware devices that are specially configured to store or to store and execute program code, such as application specific integrated circuits (ASICs), programmable logic devices (PLDs), flash memory devices, and ROM and RAM devices. Examples of computer code include machine code, such as produced by a compiler, and files containing higher level code that are executed by a computer using an interpreter. Embodiments of the present invention may be implemented in whole or in part as machine-executable instructions that may be in program modules that are executed by a processing device. Examples of program modules include libraries, programs, routines, objects, components, and data structures. In distributed computing environments, program modules may be physically located in settings that are local, remote, or both.
One skilled in the art will recognize no computing system or programming language is critical to the practice of the present invention. One skilled in the art will also recognize that a number of the elements described above may be physically and/or functionally separated into sub-modules or combined together.
It will be appreciated to those skilled in the art that the preceding examples and embodiments are exemplary and not limiting to the scope of the present invention. It is intended that all permutations, enhancements, equivalents, combinations, and improvements thereto that are apparent to those skilled in the art upon a reading of the specification and a study of the drawings are included within the true spirit and scope of the present invention.
It shall be noted that elements of the claims, below, may be arranged differently including having multiple dependencies, configurations, and combinations. For example, in embodiments, the subject matter of various claims may be combined with other claims.