End-to-End Deep Attentive Personalized Item Retrieval for Online Content-sharing Platforms

Modern online content-sharing platforms host billions of items like music, videos, and products uploaded by various providers for users to discover items of their interests. To satisfy the information needs, the task of effective item retrieval (or item search ranking) given user search queries has become one of the most fundamental problems to online content-sharing platforms. Moreover, the same query can represent different search intents for different users, so personalization is also essential for providing more satisfactory search results. Different from other similar research tasks, such as ad-hoc retrieval and product retrieval with copious words and reviews, items in content-sharing platforms usually lack sufficient descriptive information and related meta-data as features. In this paper, we propose the end-to-end deep attentive model (EDAM) to deal with personalized item retrieval for online content-sharing platforms using only discrete personal item history and queries. Each discrete item in the personal item history of a user and its content provider are first mapped to embedding vectors as continuous representations. A query-aware attention mechanism is then applied to identify the relevant contexts in the user history and construct the overall personal representation for a given query. Finally, an extreme multi-class softmax classifier aggregates the representations of both query and personal item history to provide personalized search results. We conduct extensive experiments on a large-scale real-world dataset with hundreds of million users from a large video media platform at Google. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed approach significantly outperforms several competitive baseline methods. It is also worth mentioning that this work utilizes a massive dataset from a real-world commercial content-sharing platform for personalized item retrieval to provide more insightful analysis from the industrial aspects.