Joint Modeling and Optimization of Search and Recommendation

Despite the somewhat different techniques used in developing search engines and recommender systems, they both follow the same goal: helping people to get the information they need at the right time. Due to this common goal, search and recommendation models can potentially benefit from each other. The recent advances in neural network technologies make them effective and easily extendable for various tasks, including retrieval and recommendation. This raises the possibility of jointly modeling and optimizing search ranking and recommendation algorithms, with potential benefits to both. In this paper, we present theoretical and practical reasons to motivate joint modeling of search and recommendation as a research direction. We propose a general framework that simultaneously learns a retrieval model and a recommendation model by optimizing a joint loss function. Our preliminary results on a dataset of product data indicate that the proposed joint modeling substantially outperforms the retrieval and recommendation models trained independently. We list a number of future directions for this line of research that can potentially lead to development of state-of-the-art search and recommendation models.