Ranking Robustness In Adversarial Retrieval Settings
Gregory Goren · 2019
The adversarial retrieval setting over the Web entails many challenges. Some of these are due to, essentially, ranking competitions between document authors who modify them in response to rankings induced for queries of interest so as to rank-promote the documents. One unwarranted consequence is that rankings can rapidly change due to small, almost indiscernible changes, of documents. In recent work, we addressed the issue of ranking robustness under (adversarial) document manipulations for feature-based learning-to-rank approaches. We presented a formalism of different notions of ranking robustness that gave rise to a few theoretical findings. Empirical evaluation provided support to these findings. Our next goals are to devise learning-to-rank techniques for optimizing relevance and robustness simultaneously, study the connections between ranking robustness and fairness, and to devise additional testbeds for evaluating ranking robustness.