Efficient Neural Query Auto Completion

TL;DR

This paper introduces an efficient neural query auto completion system that balances high accuracy and low latency by utilizing effective context modeling and an unnormalized language model, improving user experience in search applications.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel neural QAC system that significantly reduces latency while enhancing candidate relevance through advanced context modeling and semantic understanding.

Findings

Increases recall for unseen prefixes.

Reduces latency by approximately 95%.

Achieves better ranking performance than existing neural methods.

Abstract

Query Auto Completion (QAC), as the starting point of information retrieval tasks, is critical to user experience. Generally it has two steps: generating completed query candidates according to query prefixes, and ranking them based on extracted features. Three major challenges are observed for a query auto completion system: (1) QAC has a strict online latency requirement. For each keystroke, results must be returned within tens of milliseconds, which poses a significant challenge in designing sophisticated language models for it. (2) For unseen queries, generated candidates are of poor quality as contextual information is not fully utilized. (3) Traditional QAC systems heavily rely on handcrafted features such as the query candidate frequency in search logs, lacking sufficient semantic understanding of the candidate. In this paper, we propose an efficient neural QAC system with effective context modeling to overcome these challenges. On the candidate generation side, this system uses as much information as possible in unseen prefixes to generate relevant candidates, increasing the recall by a large margin. On the candidate ranking side, an unnormalized language model is proposed, which effectively captures deep semantics of queries. This approach presents better ranking performance over state-of-the-art neural ranking methods and reduces $\sim$95\% latency compared to neural language modeling methods. The empirical results on public datasets show that our model achieves a good balance between accuracy and efficiency. This system is served in LinkedIn job search with significant product impact observed.