Overview

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Coveo Machine Learning (Coveo ML) is a cloud and analytics-based machine learning service that continually analyzes search behavior patterns to understand which results and content lead to the best outcomes, such as customer self-service success. In addition to intuitively enhancing search results so the best-performing content always rises to the top, Coveo ML automatically delivers the most relevant search results and proactive recommendations with minimal effort.

Coveo ML continuously learns from evolving user activity and rapidly adapts recommendations following changes such as seasons, new product adoption, or industry news.

Example

A consumer electronics retailer has many online community visitors seeking help configuring a popular media player console. Using queries such as media console help, many of them found a particular article to be very helpful, and it proved successful in preventing ticket submissions. Coveo ML ART learns and automatically boosts the relevance of this article for new visitors running similar queries.

After the company releases a new media console model that quickly becomes very popular, visitors searching for media console help find an article on the new model to be more helpful. ART automatically learns this new trend and updates its recommendations.

Coveo ML offers the following model types:

Coveo architecture

1727Diagram

Behind the scenes, Coveo ML model types process usage analytics data to build and maintain complex Coveo-managed predictive models to make recommendations. You can use the Coveo Administration Console to activate and configure these model types with just a few clicks.

Models

Coveo ML models leverage UA data by creating and training algorithmic models to predict and recommend which content is most helpful to users. Coveo ML is a service managed by Coveo that you can view like a 'scientist in a box' that handles the model complexity.

Members with the required privileges can activate and configure a Coveo ML model in minutes through the Administration Console. Behind the scenes, a predictive model is automatically built and is typically ready to make recommendations within 30 to 60 minutes.

Note

The time required to build a model depends mainly on the system load (that is, the number of model requests in the queue) and the size of the training set. Therefore, even models with small training sets can take several minutes to build when the request is in the queue waiting for resources.

A Coveo ML model starts making recommendations as soon as enough data is available to the model. Some model types have threshold values. Consequently, if you just start collecting usage analytics data and enable a Coveo ML model, depending on your search traffic, it will take some time before an operational model starts to actually make recommendations, but they will get better and better as more data becomes available.

Training and retraining

A model is trained with usage analytics data from a given period and regularly retrained. The more data is available for the model to learn from, the better will be the recommendations. As a general guide, a usage analytics dataset of 10,000 queries or more typically allows a Coveo ML model to provide very relevant recommendations. A Coveo ML model is regularly retrained on the most recent usage data to ensure that recent user behavior is learned and that the model freshness is maintained.

Sub-models

By default, models are built for each combination of languages, search hubs, and tabs, because these attributes normally define different types of users and use cases.

Example

Query suggestions that were recommended based on your internal search interface logged events aren’t recommended in your external search interface.

A model learns separately from search visits made in search interfaces offered in different languages since keywords will often be different from one language to another. You can review the number of recommended items for each submodel of ART models in the Administration Console (see Reviewing model information).

Notes

  • The number of submodels doesn’t matter. However, the quality of submodels depends on the number of events that were used to build each submodel. You can review the number of recommended items for each submodel of ART models in the Administration Console (see Review model information).

  • Submodels aren’t grouped, meaning that submodels built on very different user behaviors don’t negatively impact the quality of the parent model.

  • The variation in dataset sizes used to build submodels has no negative impacts on the parent model quality.
Example

Your Community search page and your content are available in several languages, but 75% of the queries are made in the English version of the search page, only 4% on the Greek search page.

On the Greek search page, a user searches for DFT-400, a product name that’s the same in all languages. Because a submodel learned only the user behavior for the Greek search page, ART can recommend relevant Greek items for the DFT-400 product. Without language submodels, ART would most likely rather recommend DFT-400 English items that wouldn’t be included in search results because they’re not part of the Greek search interface scope.

Different search hub or interfaces typically serve different purposes where users expect or seek for different results for the same query. Submodels actually filter recommendations when they don’t match the current hub and interface combination to prevent recommending items outside of the expected scope.

Note

When you want the relevance on one search page to influence other search interfaces for a unified experience, you can set the Suggestion filters advanced model parameter accordingly. If the parameter value only contains the desired search page, the model will provide recommendations or suggestions based on user behavior on that specific search page even if the model is active on a search interface in another hub. Before modifying the value, we strongly recommend that you consult your Coveo Customer Success Manager (CSM) or Coveo Support for appropriate guidance. Moreover, you should test changes thoroughly in a sandbox environment before deploying in production.