Improving Web Search Relevance with Semantic Features.

Most existing information retrieval (IR) systems do not take much advantage of natural language processing (NLP) techniques due to the complexity and limited observed effectiveness of applying NLP to IR. In this paper, we demonstrate that substantial gains can be obtained over a strong baseline using NLP techniques, if properly handled. We propose a framework for deriving semantic text matching features from named entities identified in Web queries; we then utilize these features in a supervised machine-learned ranking approach, applying a set of emerging machine learning techniques. Our approach is especially useful for queries that contain multiple types of concepts. Comparing to a major commercial Web search engine, we observe a substantial 4% DCG5 gain over the affected queries.