International Workshop on Data Mining and Audience Intelligence for Advertising 

About: International Workshop on Data Mining and Audience Intelligence for Advertising is an academic conference. The conference publishes majorly in the area(s): Online advertising & Search advertising. Over the lifetime, 29 publications have been published by the conference receiving 615 citations.

A noisy-channel approach to contextual advertising

Abstract: Contextual advertising is a growing category of search advertising. It presents a particular challenge to ad placement systems because of the sparseness of the language of advertising. We present a system that is language independent and knowledge free based on SVM ranking. We evaluate it on a large number of advertisements appearing on real Web pages. Our contribution is two new classes of features of similarity between ads and Web pages based on machine translation technologies. We show that our features significantly improve performance over baseline techniques.

Sensitive webpage classification for content advertising

Abstract: Online advertising has been a popular topic in recent years. In this paper, we address one of the important problems in online advertising, i.e., how to detect whether a publisher webpage contains sensitive content and is appropriate for showing advertisement(s) on it.We take a webpage classification approach to solve this problem. First we design a unique sensitive content taxonomy. Then we adopt an iterative training data collection and classifier building approach, to build a hierarchical classifier which can classify webpages into one of the nodes in the sensitive content taxonomy. The experimental result show that using this approach, we are able to build a unique sensitive content classifier with decent accuracy while only requiring limited amount of human labeling effort.

Argo: intelligent advertising by mining a user's interest from his photo collections

Abstract: In this paper, we introduce a system named Argo which provides intelligent advertising made possible from users' photo collections. Based on the intuition that user-generated photos imply user interests which are the key for profitable targeted ads, the Argo system attempts to learn a user's profile from his shared photos and suggests relevant ads accordingly. To learn a user interest, in an offline step, a hierarchical and efficient topic space is constructed based on the ODP ontology, which is used later on for bridging the vocabulary gap between ads and photos as well as reducing the effect of noisy photo tags. In the online stage, the process of Argo contains three steps: 1) understanding the content and semantics of a user's photos and auto-tagging each photo to supplement user-submitted tags (such tags may not be available); 2) learning the user interest given a set of photos based on the learnt hierarchical topic space; and 3) representing ads in the topic space and matching their topic distributions with the target user interest; the top ranked ads are output as the suggested ads. Two key challenges are tackled during the process: 1) the semantic gap between the low-level image visual features and the high-level user semantics; and 2) the vocabulary impedance between photos and ads. We conducted a series of experiments based on real Flickr users and Amazon.com products (as candidate ads), which show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Probabilistic latent semantic user segmentation for behavioral targeted advertising

Abstract: Behavioral Targeting (BT), which aims to deliver the most appropriate advertisements to the most appropriate users, is attracting much attention in online advertising market. A key challenge of BT is how to automatically segment users for ads delivery, and good user segmentation may significantly improve the ad click-through rate (CTR). Different from classical user segmentation strategies, which rarely take the semantics of user behaviors into consideration, we propose in this paper a novel user segmentation algorithm named Probabilistic Latent Semantic User Segmentation (PLSUS). PLSUS adopts the probabilistic latent semantic analysis to mine the relationship between users and their behaviors so as to segment users in a semantic manner. We perform experiments on the real world ad click through log of a commercial search engine. Comparing with the other two classical clustering algorithms, K-Means and CLUTO, PLSUS can further improve the ads CTR up to 100%. To our best knowledge, this work is an early semantic user segmentation study for BT in academia.

Data-driven text features for sponsored search click prediction

Abstract: Much search engine revenue comes from sponsored search ads displayed with algorithmic search results. To maximize revenue, it is essential to choose a good slate of ads for each query, requiring accurate prediction of whether or not users will click on an ad. Click prediction is relatively easy for the ads that have been displayed many times, and have significant click history, but in the long tail with minimal or no click history, other features are needed to predict user response. In this work, we investigate the use of novel text features for this problem, within the context of a state-of-the-art sponsored search system. In particular, we propose the use of detailed word-pair indicator features between the query and ad. We compare the new features to the traditional vector-space and language modeling features extracted in a typical information-retrieval style. We evaluate these approaches in a maximum-entropy ranking model using the click-view data from a commercial search-engine traffic. We show that the word-pair features are highly helpful for sponsored search click prediction, not only improving over the sophisticated click-history feedback based systems, but also compensating for the lack of click history to some extent. In contrast, we find that the language and vector-space modeling approaches are significantly less effective.