Zihao Tang, Xin Yu, Ziyu Xiao, Zengxuan Wen, Zelin Li, Jiaxi Zhou, Hualei Wang, Haohua Wang, Haizhen Huang, Weiwei Deng, Feng Sun, Qi Zhang. Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2026.

The nucleus of online sponsored search systems lies in measuring the relevance between the search intents of users and the advertising purposes of advertisers. Existing conventional doublet-based (query-keyword) relevance models solely rely on short queries and keywords to uncover such intents, which ignore the diverse and personalized preferences of participants (i.e., users and advertisers), resulting in undesirable advertising performance. In this paper, we investigate the novel problem of Personalized A dvertiser-aware Sponsored Search (PASS). Our motivation lies in incorporating the portraits of users and advertisers into relevance models to facilitate the modeling of intrinsic search intents and advertising purposes, leading to a quadruple-based (i.e., user-query-keyword-advertiser) task. Various types of historical behaviors are explored in the format of hypergraphs to provide abundant signals on identifying the preferences of participants. A novel heterogeneous textual hypergraph transformer is further proposed to deeply fuse the textual semantics and the high-order hypergraph topology. Our proposal is extensively evaluated over real industry datasets, and experimental results demonstrate its superiority.

Relevance models measure the semantic closeness between queries and the candidate ads, widely recognized as the nucleus of sponsored search systems. Conventional relevance models solely rely on the textual data within the queries and ads, whose performance is hindered by the scarce semantic information in these short texts. Recently, user behavior graphs have been incorporated to provide complementary information beyond pure textual semantics.Despite the promising performance, behavior-enhanced models suffer from exhausting resource costs due to the extra computations introduced by explicit topological aggregations. In this paper, we propose a novel Multi-Grained Topological Pre-Training paradigm, MGTLM, to teach language models to understand multi-grained topological information in behavior graphs, which contributes to eliminating explicit graph aggregations and avoiding information loss. Extensive experimental results over online and offline settings demonstrate the superiority of our proposal.

Zhoujin Tian, Chaozhuo Li, Shuo Ren, Zhiqiang Zuo, Zengxuan Wen, Xinyue Hu, Xiao Han, Haizhen Huang, Denvy Deng, Qi Zhang, Xing Xie. Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. 2022.