Modeling Label Ambiguity for Neural List-Wise Learning to Rank

List-wise learning to rank methods are considered to be the stateof-the-art. One of the major problems with these methods is that the ambiguous nature of relevance labels in learning to rank data is ignored. Ambiguity of relevance labels refers to the phenomenon that multiple documents may be assigned the same relevance label for a given query, so that no preference order should be learned for those documents. In this paper we propose a novel sampling technique for computing a list-wise loss that can take into account this ambiguity. We show the e ectiveness of the proposed method by training a 3-layer deep neural network. We compare our new loss function to two strong baselines: ListNet and ListMLE. We show that our method generalizes better and signi cantly outperforms other methods on the validation and test sets. CCS CONCEPTS •Computingmethodologies→Neural networks; •Information systems →Learning to rank;