Finding Negative Key Phrases for Internet Advertising Campaigns using Wikipedia

Proceedings of Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing, pages 648–653, Hissar, Bulgaria, 12-14 September 2011. Finding Negative Key Phrases for Internet Advertising Campaigns using Wikipedia Martin Scaiano University of Ottawa mscai056@uottawa.ca Diana Inkpen University of Ottawa diana@site.uottawa.com Abstract In internet advertising, negative key phrases are used in order to exclude the display of an advertisement to non-target audience. We describe a method for auto- matically identifying negative key phrases. We use Wikipedia as our sense inventory and as an annotated corpus from which we create context vectors and determine nega- tive phrases, which correlate with negative senses of a positive key phrase. 1 Introduction Online advertisers select and bid on key phrases for which their ads will be displayed. Each time an ad is displayed, it is called an impression. The cost of the advertising campaign may be tied di- rectly or indirectly to the number of impressions: each impression may cost the customer, or pricing maybe based on the rate of response to an adver- tisement (click through rate). Either way, impres- sions to those who are not interested in a product can cost the advertiser. Key phrase advertising attempts to infer the in- terest of a “searcher” from the key phrases they are searching for. Many key phrases have mul- tiple meanings; thus extra phrases are required to accurately infer meaning. There are two ap- proaches that can be taken to avoid uninterested “searchers”: over-specification to exclude all other meanings of ambiguous key phrases; and explicit exclusion of some expressions, called negative key phrases. Over-specification would simply involve select- ing long enough and specific enough key phrases so that all ambiguity is removed. This can lead to an explosion of key phrases, many of which may never occur. Finding all possible specific key phrases could be an exhaustive task. Managing all these key phrases could become cumbersome; but worst of all, interested “searchers” who use the ambiguous terms may not see the advertisement. Negative key phrases refer to phrases that sug- gest that a “searcher” is not interested in the prod- uct. Thus, in the case of an ambiguous query the advertisement should be shown; but if any nega- tive keywords are present in the query, then the advertisement should not be shown. Negative key- words are a basic function of internet advertising platforms such as Adwords by Google. There are two types of negative keywords: neg- ative emotions and negative meanings. Negative emotion keywords indicate a “searcher” has nega- tive feelings about the product. Negative meaning refers to unrelated alternate senses of a keyword. Consider for example if you were selling Toyota Corollas (a car). You would likely bid on the word “Corolla” in hopes of attracting a customer. Some negative emotional keywords might be “lemon” or “defects”, which suggest the “searcher” has neg- ative sentiments regarding the vehicle. A neg- ative sense keyword might be “flower”, which strongly suggests the “searcher” is interested in flower petals (corollas) and not the car. Our goal is to develop …

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