text: Information Retrieval Systems have revolutionized the organization and extraction of Information. In recent years, mobile applications (apps) have become primary tools of collecting and disseminating information. However, limited research is available on how to retrieve and organize mobile apps on users' devices. In this paper, authors propose a novel method to estimate app-embeddings which are then applied to tasks like app clustering, classification, and retrieval. Usage of app-embedding for query expansion, nearest neighbor analysis enables unique and interesting use cases to enhance end-user experience with mobile apps.
  @cite_6: Smartphones and tablets with their apps pervaded our everyday life, leading to a new demand for search tools to help users find the right apps to satisfy their immediate needs. While there are a few commercial mobile app search engines available, the new task of mobile app retrieval has not yet been rigorously studied. Indeed, there does not yet exist a test collection for quantitatively evaluating this new retrieval task. In this paper, we first study the effectiveness of the state-of-the-art retrieval models for the app retrieval task using a new app retrieval test data we created. We then propose and study a novel approach that generates a new representation for each app. Our key idea is to leverage user reviews to find out important features of apps and bridge vocabulary gap between app developers and users. Specifically, we jointly model app descriptions and user reviews using topic model in order to generate app representations while excluding noise in reviews. Experiment results indicate that the proposed approach is effective and outperforms the state-of-the-art retrieval models for app retrieval.
  @cite_0: Most Learning To Rank (LTR) algorithms like Ranking SVM, RankNet, LambdaRank and LambdaMART use only relevance label judgments as ground truth for training. But in common scenarios like ranking of information cards (google now, other personal assistants), mobile notifications, netflix recommendations, etc. there is additional information which can be captured from user behavior and how user interacts with the retrieved items. Within the relevance labels, there might be different sets whose information (i.e. cluster information) can be derived implicitly from user interaction (positive, negative, neutral, etc.) or from explicit-user feedback ('Do not show again', 'I like this suggestion', etc). This additional information provides significant knowledge for training any ranking algorithm using two-dimensional output variable. This paper proposes a novel method to use the relevance label along with cluster information to better train the ranking models. Results for user-trial Notification Ranking dataset and standard datasets like LETOR 4.0, MSLR-WEB10K and YahooLTR further support this claim.
  @cite_27: With the recent growth of conversational systems and intelligent assistants such as Apple Siri and Google Assistant, mobile devices are becoming even more pervasive in our lives. As a consequence, users are getting engaged with the mobile apps and frequently search for an information need in their apps. However, users cannot search within their apps through their intelligent assistants. This requires a unified mobile search framework that identifies the target app(s) for the user's query, submits the query to the app(s), and presents the results to the user. In this paper, we take the first step forward towards developing unified mobile search. In more detail, we introduce and study the task of target apps selection, which has various potential real-world applications. To this aim, we analyze attributes of search queries as well as user behaviors, while searching with different mobile apps. The analyses are done based on thousands of queries that we collected through crowdsourcing. We finally study the performance of state-of-the-art retrieval models for this task and propose two simple yet effective neural models that significantly outperform the baselines. Our neural approaches are based on learning high-dimensional representations for mobile apps. Our analyses and experiments suggest specific future directions in this research area.
  @cite_23: People often implicitly or explicitly express their needs in social media in the form of "user status text". Such text can be very useful for service providers and product manufacturers to proactively provide relevant services or products that satisfy people's immediate needs. In this paper, we study how to infer a user's intent based on the user's "status text" and retrieve relevant mobile apps that may satisfy the user's needs. We address this problem by framing it as a new entity retrieval task where the query is a user's status text and the entities to be retrieved are mobile apps. We first propose a novel approach that generates a new representation for each query. Our key idea is to leverage social media to build parallel corpora that contain implicit intention text and the corresponding explicit intention text. Specifically, we model various user intentions in social media text using topic models, and we predict user intention in a query that contains implicit intention. Then, we retrieve relevant mobile apps with the predicted user intention. We evaluate the mobile app retrieval task using a new data set we create. Experiment results indicate that the proposed model is effective and outperforms the state-of-the-art retrieval models.
  @cite_11: User reviews of mobile apps often contain complaints or suggestions which are valuable for app developers to improve user experience and satisfaction. However, due to the large volume and noisy-nature of those reviews, manually analyzing them for useful opinions is inherently challenging. To address this problem, we propose MARK, a keyword-based framework for semi-automated review analysis. MARK allows an analyst describing his interests in one or some mobile apps by a set of keywords. It then finds and lists the reviews most relevant to those keywords for further analysis. It can also draw the trends over time of those keywords and detect their sudden changes, which might indicate the occurrences of serious issues. To help analysts describe their interests more effectively, MARK can automatically extract keywords from raw reviews and rank them by their associations with negative reviews. In addition, based on a vector-based semantic representation of keywords, MARK can divide a large set of keywords into more cohesive subsets, or suggest keywords similar to the selected ones.
summary: These days, mobile applications form a large chunk of data which is available for consumption. Some work has been done to mine user-reviews on mobile applications @cite_11 . Mobile app retrieval has been experimented by few researchers to learn application representation using topic modeling @cite_6 and intention in social media text @cite_23 . Very recent work has been done to build a unified mobile search framework using neural approaches to learn high-dimensional representations for mobile apps @cite_27 . Also, there are recent attempts made to use Learning-to-Rank algorithms for optimizing retrieval of mobile notifications triggered by installed apps @cite_0 . However, application embeddings have been rarely utilized to perform query expansion, nearest neighbor analysis and other tasks related to mobile applications.