Context Models For Web Search Personalization

We present our solution to the Yandex Personalized Web Search Challenge. The aim of this challenge was to use the historical search logs to personalize top-N document rankings for a set of test users. We used over 100 features extracted from user- and query-depended contexts to train neural net and tree-based learning-to-rank and regression models. Our final submission, which was a blend of several different models, achieved an NDCG@10 of 0.80476 and placed 4'th amongst the 194 teams winning 3'rd prize.