Enhancing CTR Prediction in Recommendation Domain with Search Query Representation

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel framework that leverages user search query embeddings and contrastive learning to enhance click-through rate prediction in recommendation systems, effectively addressing data sparsity and domain shift issues.

Contribution

The proposed method uniquely integrates search query information with recommendation data using diffusion and contrastive learning, improving CTR prediction accuracy.

Findings

Outperforms state-of-the-art models in CTR prediction

Effectively mitigates data sparsity issues

Enhances understanding of user interests across domains

Abstract

Many platforms, such as e-commerce websites, offer both search and recommendation services simultaneously to better meet users' diverse needs. Recommendation services suggest items based on user preferences, while search services allow users to search for items before providing recommendations. Since users and items are often shared between the search and recommendation domains, there is a valuable opportunity to enhance the recommendation domain by leveraging user preferences extracted from the search domain. Existing approaches either overlook the shift in user intention between these domains or fail to capture the significant impact of learning from users' search queries on understanding their interests. In this paper, we propose a framework that learns from user search query embeddings within the context of user preferences in the recommendation domain. Specifically, user search query sequences from the search domain are used to predict the items users will click at the next time point in the recommendation domain. Additionally, the relationship between queries and items is explored through contrastive learning. To address issues of data sparsity, the diffusion model is incorporated to infer positive items the user will select after searching with certain queries in a denoising manner, which is particularly effective in preventing false positives. Effectively extracting this information, the queries are integrated into click-through rate prediction in the recommendation domain. Experimental analysis demonstrates that our model outperforms state-of-the-art models in the recommendation domain.