To Swing Or Not To Swing: Learning When (Not) To Advertise

Web textual advertising can be interpreted as a search problem over the corpus of ads available for display in a particular context. In contrast to conventional information retrieval systems, which always return results if the corpus contains any documents lexically related to the query, in Web advertising it is acceptable, and occasionally even desirable, not to show any results. When no ads are relevant to the user's interests, then showing irrelevant ads should be avoided since they annoy the user and produce no economic benefit. In this paper the authors pose a decision problem "Whether to swing", that is, whether or not to show any of the ads for the incoming request.