James Salsman wrote: How will the Foundation's approach to machine learning of search Overfitting, for those who aren't familiar with the term, describes the situation where a machine learning model inappropriately learns very specific details about its training set that don't generalize to the real world. From the point of view of training, the model seems to be getting better and better, while real-world performance is actually decreasing. As a somewhat silly example, a model could learn that queries that have exactly 38 words in them are 100% about baseball—because there is only one example of a query in the training set that is 38 words long, and it is about baseball. For more on overfitting, see Wikipedia.[1] We employ the usual safeguards against overfitting. Certain parameters that control how a specific type of model is built can discourage overfitting. For example, not allowing a decision inside the model to be made on too little data—so rather than 1 or 2 examples to base a decision on, the model can be told it needs to see 5, or 50, or 500. We also have separate training and testing data sets. So we build a model on one set of data, then evaluate the model on another set. The estimate of model performance from the training set will always be at least a bit optimistic, but the testing set—which is large enough to be representative and which does not overlap with the training set—gives a more realistic estimate. We choose the model that performs the best on the testing set. Overfitted models will do worse on the testing set, and we won't use them. We have other methods of validating our models as well. We have a set of machines and software that we collectively call Relevance Forge (a.k.a. RelForge) that we can use to run large sets of queries against different versions of the same index. We can compare the before and after results, both automatically and manually. RelForge lets us easily gauge the *impact* of a change. For example, a 1% net improvement could come from making 1% of queries a bit better, or from making 49% a bit worse and 50% a bit better. So, we can easily see whether 1% or 99% of results change. If we see a 2% improvement but a 99% impact, something weird is happening, and we'd investigate more deeply. We also have many definitions of "results change" that we can evaluate: #1 result changes, top 3 results change (ordered or unordered), number of results changes, number of queries getting zero results changes. And for each of these we can manually inspect a random selection of affected queries to decide whether the results are generally better or not. We also run A/B tests, where we let a small sample of users get the proposed change, while a similar number get the standard results. We do statistical analyses on user engagement with results and various other click metrics that let us compare the control and experimental conditions. For more on how we test search changes in general, see Testing Search on mediawiki.org.[2] In both of these cases—RelForge testing and A/B testing in production—overfitted models would perform poorly, and that would become apparent. For example, if most searches on "rent" do not pertain to "rent Your wording has left me a bit confused, and I'm not sure whether your concern is (a) that a query of "rent" should never return "rent seeking", and so the machine learning model should never present it, or (b) that we should guard against building a model that *never* presents results on "rent seeking" for a query of "rent". I'll briefly address each. Case (a): "rent" should *never* return "rent seeking" It's not clear to me that returning "rent seeking" for a query of "rent" is necessarily a case of overfitting per se, but in general the click models that we use would take note that users who search for "rent", say, click on the musical 70% of the time and the disambiguation page 29% of the time. Those would be the "good" results and the model would prioritize moving them to the top of the list. *Never* presenting results on "rent seeking" would be an error. The word is present in the article, and in the title, so it should be somewhere in the results. Moving it up or down the results list is a question of ranking, which is what the machine learning model is trying to figure out. Case (b): "rent" should not be *prevented* from returning "rent seeking" Our click data shows that about 80% of clicks on search results are on one of the first two results, and more than 90% are on the top 10. Our click models for scoring the order of results reflect that. All of the value then, from the machine learning model's point of view, comes from getting the top 3 to 5 results in the best possible order. There's not a lot of value in pushing down any particular result much farther than that. For a single word query like "rent", title matches are the best. There are only 138 results for intitle:rent, vs over 44K for just rent—however, the first page of results for both is the same. We are interested in use cases other than searchers who are looking for a particular article or particular information, though that tends to predominate. Editors might want to find all the articles with a particular word (e.g., a misspelling) and no result would be excluded by the machine learning model, just possibly ranked lower. Hope that helps, —Trey [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overfitting [2] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Discovery/Search/Testing_Search Trey Jones Software Engineer, Discovery Wikimedia Foundation *(via Deb Tankersley's email address as Trey's original email got moderated)* On Tue, Jun 13, 2017 at 3:43 PM, James Salsman &lt;jsalsman(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: > On Wed, Jun 14, 2017 at 5:25 AM, Deborah Tankersley > &lt;dtankersley(a)wikimedia.org&gt; wrote: > > > > The Discovery team structure has now changed, but the new teams will > still > > work together to complete the goals as listed in the draft annual > plan.[2] > > A summary of their anticipated work, as we finalize these changes, is > > below. We plan on doing a check-in at the end of the calendar year to see > > how our goals are progressing with the new smaller and separated team > > structure. > > > > Here is a list of the various projects under the Discovery umbrella, > along > > with the goals that they will be working on: > > > > Search Backend > > > > Improve search capabilities: > > > > Implement ‘learning to rank’ [3] and other advanced machine learning > > methodologies > >... > > [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_to_rank > > How will the Foundation's approach to machine learning of search > > For example, if most searches on "rent" do not pertain to "rent > > _______________________________________________ > Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/ > wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/ > wiki/Wikimedia-l > New messages to: Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, > <mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe> _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>