Ranking models lie at the heart of research on information retrieval (IR). During the past
decades, different techniques have been proposed for constructing ranking models, from
traditional heuristic methods, probabilistic methods, to modern machine learning methods.
Recently, with the advance of deep learning technology, we have witnessed a growing body
of work in applying shallow or deep neural networks to the ranking problem in IR, referred to
as neural ranking models in this paper. The power of neural ranking models lies in the ability …