Content-Based Relevance Estimation in Retrieval Settings with Ranking-Incentivized Document Manipulations

In retrieval settings such as the Web, many document authors are ranking incentivized: they opt to have their documents highly ranked for queries of interest. Consequently, they often respond to rankings by modifying their documents. These modifications can hurt retrieval effectiveness even if the resultant documents are of high quality. We present novel content-based relevance estimates which are "ranking-incentives aware"; that is, the underlying assumption is that content can be the result of ranking incentives rather than of pure authorship considerations. The suggested estimates are based on inducing information from past dynamics of the document corpus. Empirical evaluation attests to the clear merits of our most effective methods. For example, they substantially outperform state-of-the-art approaches that were not designed to address ranking-incentivized document manipulations.