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Conceptual graphs, which is a particular type of Knowledge Graphs, play an essential role in semantic search. Prior conceptual graph construction approaches typically extract high-frequent, coarsegrained, and time-invariant concepts from formal texts. In real applications, however, it is necessary to extract less-frequent, finegrained, and time-varying conceptual knowledge and build taxonomy in an evolving manner. In this paper, we introduce an approach to implementing and deploying the conceptual graph at Alibaba. Specifically, We propose a framework called AliCG which is capable of a) extracting fine-grained concepts by a novel bootstrapping with alignment consensus approach, b) mining long-tail concepts with a novel low-resource phrase mining approach, c) updating the graph dynamically via a concept distribution estimation method based on implicit and explicit user behaviors. We have deployed the framework at Alibaba UC Browser. Extensive offline evaluation as well as online A/B testing demonstrate the efficacy of our approach.

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Entity recommendation, providing search users with an improved experience via assisting them in finding related entities for a given query, has become an indispensable feature of today's search engines. Existing studies typically only consider the queries with explicit entities. They usually fail to handle complex queries that without entities, such as "what food is good for cold weather", because their models could not infer the underlying meaning of the input text. In this work, we believe that contexts convey valuable evidence that could facilitate the semantic modeling of queries, and take them into consideration for entity recommendation. In order to better model the semantics of queries and entities, we learn the representation of queries and entities jointly with attentive deep neural networks. We evaluate our approach using large-scale, realworld search logs from a widely used commercial Chinese search engine. Our system has been deployed in ShenMa Search Engine 1 and you can fetch it in UC Browser of Alibaba. Results from online A/B test suggest that the impression efficiency of click-through rate increased by 5.1% and page view increased by 5.5%.

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Query difficulty estimation (QDE) attempts to automatically predict the performance of the search results returned for a given query. QDE has been widely investigated in text document retrieval for many years. However, few research works have been explored in image retrieval. State-of-the-art QDE methods in image retrieval mainly investigate the statistical characteristics (coherence, robustness, etc.) of the returned images to derive a value for indicating the query difficulty degree. To the best of our knowledge, little research has been done to directly estimate the real retrieval performance of the search results, such as average precision, instead of only an indicator. In this paper, we propose a novel query difficulty estimation approach which automatically estimate the average precision of the image search results. Specifically, we first select a set of query relevant and query irrelevant images for each query via pseudo relevance feedback. Then an efficient and effective voting scheme is proposed to estimate the relevance label of each image in the search results. Based on the images' relevance labels, the average precision of the search results returned for the given query is derived. The experimental results on a benchmark image search dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.