The document discusses enhancements to the traditional tf-idf model used in search systems at Etsy, focusing on an experiment-driven culture that employs information gain to improve search relevance. It outlines the shortcomings of using idf, specifically its failure to measure term usefulness, and proposes a new approach that incorporates term quality. Additionally, the document details technical implementations involving Hadoop for computing term distributions and emphasizes future directions such as latent semantic indexing.

1. Beyond TF-IDF
Stephen Murtagh
etsy.com

3. 20,000,000 items

4. 1,000,000 sellers

6. 15,000,000 daily
searches
80,000,000 daily calls to Solr

7. Etsy Engineering
• Code as Craft - our engineering blog
• http://codeascraft.etsy.com/
• Continuous Deployment
• https://github.com/etsy/deployinator
• Experiment-driven culture
• Hybrid engineering roles
• Dev-Ops
• Data-Driven Products

8. Etsy Search
• 2 search clusters: Flip and Flop
• Master -> 20 slaves
• Only one cluster takes traffic
• Thrift (no HTTP endpoint)
• BitTorrent for index replication
• Solr 4.1
• Incremental index every 12 minutes

9. Beyond TF-IDF
•Why?
•What?
•How?

11. Luggage tags
“unique bag”
q = unique+bag

12. q = unique+bag
>

13. Scoring in Lucene

14. Scoring in Lucene
Fixed for any given query
constant

15. Scoring in Lucene
f(term, document)
f(term)

16. Scoring in Lucene
User content
Only measure rarity

17. IDF(“unique”)
4.429547
IDF(“bag”)
4.32836>

18. q = unique+bag
“unique unique bag” “unique bag bag”
>

19. “unique” tells us
nothing...

20. Stop words
• Add “unique” to stop word list?
• What about “handmade” or “blue”?
• Low-information words can still be useful
for matching
• ... but harmful for ranking

21. Why not replace IDF?

22. Beyond TF-IDF
•Why?
• IDF ignores term “usefulness”
•What?
•How?

23. Beyond TF-IDF
•Why?
• IDF ignores term “usefulness”
•What?
•How?

24. What do we replace it
with?

25. Benefits of IDF
I1 =





doc1 doc2 doc3 . . . docn
art 2 0 1 . . . 1
jewelry 1 3 0 . . . 0
...
...
termm 1 0 1 . . . 0






26. Benefits of IDF
I1 =





doc1 doc2 doc3 . . . docn
art 2 0 1 . . . 1
jewelry 1 3 0 . . . 0
...
...
termm 1 0 1 . . . 0





IDF(jewelry) = 1 + log(
n
d id,jewelry
)

27. Sharding
I1 =





doc1 doc2 doc3 . . . dock
art 2 0 1 . . . 1
jewelry 1 3 0 . . . 0
...
...
termm 1 0 1 . . . 0





I2 =





dock+1 dock+2 dock+3 . . . docn
art 6 1 0 . . . 1
jewelry 0 1 3 . . . 0
...
...
termm 0 1 1 . . . 0






28. Sharding
I1 =





doc1 doc2 doc3 . . . dock
art 2 0 1 . . . 1
jewelry 1 3 0 . . . 0
...
...
termm 1 0 1 . . . 0





I2 =





dock+1 dock+2 dock+3 . . . docn
art 6 1 0 . . . 1
jewelry 0 1 3 . . . 0
...
...
termm 0 1 1 . . . 0





IDF(jewelry) = 1 + log(
n
d id,jewelry
)

29. Sharding
I1 =





doc1 doc2 doc3 . . . dock
art 2 0 1 . . . 1
jewelry 1 3 0 . . . 0
...
...
termm 1 0 1 . . . 0





I2 =





dock+1 dock+2 dock+3 . . . docn
art 6 1 0 . . . 1
jewelry 0 1 3 . . . 0
...
...
termm 0 1 1 . . . 0





IDF1(jewelry) = IDF2(jewelry) = IDF(jewelry)

30. Sharded IDF options
• Ignore it - Shards score differently
• Shards exchange stats - Messy
• Central source distributes IDF to shards

31. Information Gain
• P(x) - Probability of x appearing in a listing
• P(x|y) - Probability of x appearing given y appears
info(y) = D(P(X|y)||P(X))
info(y) = Σx∈X log(
P(x|y)
P(x)
) ∗ P(x|y)

32. Term Info(x) IDF
unique 0.26 4.43
bag 1.24 4.33
pattern 1.20 4.38
original 0.85 4.38
dress 1.31 4.42
man 0.64 4.41
photo 0.74 4.37
stone 0.92 4.35
Similar IDF

33. Term Info(x) IDF
unique 0.26 4.39
black 0.22 3.32
red 0.22 3.52
handmade 0.20 3.26
two 0.32 5.64
white 0.19 3.32
three 0.37 6.19
for 0.21 3.59
Similar Info Gain

34. q = unique+bag
Using IDF
score(“unique unique bag”)
score(“unique bag bag”)
Using information gain
score(“unique unique bag”)
score(“unique bag bag”)

35. Beyond TF-IDF
•Why?
• IDF ignores term “usefulness”
•What?
•How?

36. Beyond TF-IDF
•Why?
• IDF ignores term “usefulness”
•What?
• Information gain accounts for term quality
•How?

37. Beyond TF-IDF
•Why?
• IDF ignores term “usefulness”
•What?
• Information gain accounts for term quality
•How?

38. Listing Quality
• Performance relative
to rank
• Hadoop: logs - hdfs
• cron: hdfs - master
• bash: master - slave
• Loaded as external file
field

39. Computing info gain
I1 =





doc1 doc2 doc3 . . . docn
art 2 0 1 . . . 1
jewelry 1 3 0 . . . 0
...
...
termm 1 0 1 . . . 0





info(y) = D(P(X|y)||P(X))
info(y) = Σx∈X log(
P(x|y)
P(x)
) ∗ P(x|y)

40. Hadoop
• Brute-force
• Count all terms
• Count all co-occuring terms
• Construct distributions
• Compute info gain for all terms

41. File Distribution
• cron copies score file to master
• master replicates file to slaves
infogain=`find /search/data/ -maxdepth 1 -type f -
name info_gain.* -print | sort | tail -n 1`
scp $infogain user@$slave:$infogain

42. File Distribution

43. schema.xml

44. Beyond TF-IDF
•Why?
• IDF ignores term “usefulness”
•What?
• Information gain accounts for term quality
•How?
• Hadoop + similarity factory = win

45. Fast Deploys,
Careful Testing
• Idea
• Proof of Concept
• Side-By-Side
• A/B test
• 100% Live

46. Side-by-Side

50. Relevant != High quality

51. A/B Test
• Users are randomly assigned to A or B
• A sees IDF-based results
• B sees info gain-based results

52. A/B Test
• Users are randomly assigned to A or B
• A sees IDF-based results
• B sees info gain-based results
• Small but significant decrease in clicks,
page views, etc.

53. More homogeneous results
Lower average quality score

54. Next Steps

55. Parameter Tweaking...
Rebalance relevancy and quality signals in score

56. The Future

57. Latent Semantic
Indexing in Solr/Lucene

58. Latent Semantic
Indexing
• In TF-IDF, documents are sparse vectors in
term space
• LSI re-maps these to dense vectors in
“concept” space
• Construct transformation matrix:
• Load file at index and query time
• Re-map query and documents
Rm
+
Rr
Tr×m

59. CONTACT
Stephen Murtagh
smurtagh@etsy.com