5 papers
Bridging the Cold-Start Gap: LLM-Powered Synthetic Data Generation for Natural Language Search at Airbnb
Wendy Ran Wei, Hao Li, Weiwei Guo +9
Deploying natural language search systems presents a critical cold-start challenge: no real user queries to learn linguistic patterns, and no relevance labels to train ranking mode…
High Precision Audience Expansion via Extreme Classification in a Two-Sided Marketplace
Dillon Davis, Huiji Gao, Thomas Legrand +8
Airbnb search must balance a worldwide, highly varied supply of homes with guests whose location, amenity, style, and price expectations differ widely. Meeting those expectations h…
Beyond Pairwise Learning-To-Rank At Airbnb
Malay Haldar, Daochen Zha, Huiji Gao +2
There are three fundamental asks from a ranking algorithm: it should scale to handle a large number of items, sort items accurately by their utility, and impose a total order on th…
Predicting Potential Customer Support Needs and Optimizing Search Ranking in a Two-Sided Marketplace
Do-kyum Kim, Han Zhao, Huiji Gao +3
Airbnb is an online marketplace that connects hosts and guests to unique stays and experiences. When guests stay at homes booked on Airbnb, there are a small fraction of stays that…
Transforming Location Retrieval at Airbnb: A Journey from Heuristics to Reinforcement Learning
Dillon Davis, Huiji Gao, Thomas Legrand +6
The Airbnb search system grapples with many unique challenges as it continues to evolve. We oversee a marketplace that is nuanced by geography, diversity of homes, and guests with…