Learning to Generate Personalized Query Auto-Completions via a Multi-View Multi-Task Attentive Approach

In this paper, we study the task of Query Auto-Completion (QAC), which is a very significant feature of modern search engines. In real industrial application, there always exist two major problems of QAC - weak personalization and unseen queries. To address these problems, we propose M2A, a multi-view multi-task attentive framework to learn personalized query auto-completion models. We propose a new Transformer-based hierarchical encoder to model different kinds of sequential behaviors, which can be seen as multiple distinct views of the user's searching history, and then a prefix-to-history attention mechanism is used to select the most relevant information to compose the final intention representation. To learn more informative representations, we propose to incorporate multi-task learning into the model training. Two different kinds of supervisory information provided by query logs are utilized at the same time by jointly training a CTR prediction model and a query generation model.