Up Next: Retrieval Methods for Large Scale Related Video Suggestion

The explosive growth in sharing and consumption of the video content on the web creates a unique opportunity for scientific advances in video retrieval, recommendation and discovery. In this paper, we focus on the task of video suggestion, commonly found in many online applications. The current state-of-the-art video suggestion techniques are based on the collaborative filtering analysis, and suggest videos that are likely to be co-viewed with the watched video. In this paper, we propose augmenting the collaborative filtering analysis with the topical representation of the video content to suggest related videos. We propose two novel methods for topical video representation. The first method uses information retrieval heuristics such as tf-idf, while the second method learns the optimal topical representations based on the implicit user feedback available in the online scenario. We conduct a large scale live experiment on YouTube traffic, and demonstrate that augmenting collaborative filtering with topical representations significantly improves the quality of the related video suggestions in a live setting, especially for categories with fresh and topically-rich video content such as news videos. In addition, we show that employing user feedback for learning the optimal topical video representations can increase the user engagement by more than 80% over the standard information retrieval representation, when compared to the collaborative filtering baseline.