Large-Scale Adversarial Sports Play Retrieval with Learning to Rank

As teams of professional leagues are becoming more and more analytically driven, the interest in effective data management and access of sports plays has dramatically increased. In this article, we present a retrieval system that can quickly find the most relevant plays from historical games given an input query. To search through a large number of games at an interactive speed, our system is built upon a distributed framework so that each query-result pair is evaluated in parallel. We also propose a pairwise learning to rank approach to improve search ranking based on users’ clickthrough behavior. The similarity metric in training the rank function is based on automatically learnt features from a convolutional autoencoder. Finally, we showcase the efficacy of our learning to rank approach by demonstrating rank quality in a user study.