The highly dynamic nature of online commenting environments makes accurate ratings prediction for new comments challenging. In such a setting, in addition to exploiting comments with high predicted ratings, it is also critical to explore comments with high uncertainty in the predictions. In this paper, we propose a novel upper confidence bound (UCB) algorithm called LOGUCB that balances exploration with exploitation when the average rating of a comment is modeled using logistic regression on its features. At the core of our LOGUCB algorithm lies a novel variance approximation technique for the Bayesian logistic regression model that is used to compute the UCB value for each comment. In experiments with a real-life comments dataset from Yahoo! News, we show that LOGUCB with bag-of-words and topic features outperforms state-of-the-art explore-exploit algorithms.

We consider the problem of learning structured output probabilistic models with training examples having partial labels. Partial label scenarios arise commonly in web applications such as taxonomy (hierarchical) classification, multi-label classification and information extraction from web pages. For example, label information may be available only at the internal node level (not at the leaf level) for some pages in a taxonomy classification problem. In a multi-label classification problem, it may be available only for some of the classes (in each example). Similarly, in a sequence learning problem, we may have label information only for some nodes in the training sequences. Conventionally, marginal likelihood maximization technique has been used to solve these problems. In such a solution unlabeled examples and any side information like expected label distribution (or correlation in a multi-label setting) of the unlabeled part are not used. We solve these problems by incorporating entropy and label distribution or correlation regularizations along with marginal likelihood. Entropy and label distribution regularizations have been used previously in semi-supervised learning with fully unlabeled examples. In this paper we develop probabilistic taxonomy and multi-label classifier models, and provide the ideas needed for expanding their usage to the partial label scenario. Experiments on real-life taxonomy and multi-label learning problems show that significant improvements in accuracy are achieved by incorporating these regularizations, when most of the examples are only partially labeled.

Vertex is a Wrapper Induction system developed at Yahoo! for extracting structured records from template-based Web pages. To operate at Web scale, Vertex employs a host of novel algorithms for (1) Grouping similar structured pages in a Web site, (2) Picking the appropriate sample pages for wrapper inference, (3) Learning XPath-based extraction rules that are robust to variations in site structure, (4) Detecting site changes by monitoring sample pages, and (5) Optimizing editorial costs by reusing rules, etc. The system is deployed in production and currently extracts more than 250 million records from more than 200 Web sites. To the best of our knowledge, Vertex is the first system to do high-precision information extraction at Web scale.