We are giving a half-day tutorial at the WSDM 2016 conference. This is a refined version of the introductory tutorial we gave at SIGIR 2015 with a particular focus on practical applications.
“Click Models for Web Search and their Applications to IR”
Click models, probabilistic models of the behavior of search engine users, have been studied extensively by the information retrieval community during the last eight years. We now have a handful of basic click models, inference methods, evaluation principles and applications for click models, that form the building blocks of ongoing research efforts in the area. The goal of this tutorial is to bring together current efforts in the area, summarize the research performed so far and give a holistic view on existing click models for web search.
The aims of this tutorial are the following:
The aims of this tutorial are the following:
- Describe existing click models in a unified way, i.e., using common notation and terminology, so that different models can easily be related to each other.
- Compare commonly used click models, discuss their advantages and limitations and provide a set of recommendations on their usage.
- Provide ready-to-use formulas and implementations of existing click models and detail general inference procedures to facilitate the development of new ones.
- Give an overview of existing datasets and tools for working with click models and develop new ones.
- Provide an overview of click model applications and directions for future development of click models.
Participants of any of these tutorials will get the following support materials:
- Author's version of the book
- Copy of the slides
- Code and data samples to follow live demos
Materials

wsdm2016-clickmodels-code.zip | |
File Size: | 1447 kb |
File Type: | zip |

cheatsheet.pdf | |
File Size: | 484 kb |
File Type: |

wsdm2016-clickmodels.pdf | |
File Size: | 3891 kb |
File Type: |