  Most of ranking models are trained only with displayed items (most are hot
items), but they are utilized to retrieve items in the entire space which
consists of both displayed and non-displayed items (most are long-tail items).
Due to the sample selection bias, the long-tail items lack sufficient records
to learn good feature representations, i.e. data sparsity and cold start
problems. The resultant distribution discrepancy between displayed and
non-displayed items would cause poor long-tail performance. To this end, we
propose an entire space adaptation model (ESAM) to address this problem from
the perspective of domain adaptation (DA). ESAM regards displayed and
non-displayed items as source and target domains respectively. Specifically, we
design the attribute correlation alignment that considers the correlation
between high-level attributes of the item to achieve distribution alignment.
Furthermore, we introduce two effective regularization strategies, i.e.
\textit{center-wise clustering} and \textit{self-training} to improve DA
process. Without requiring any auxiliary information and auxiliary domains,
ESAM transfers the knowledge from displayed items to non-displayed items for
alleviating the distribution inconsistency. Experiments on two public datasets
and a large-scale industrial dataset collected from Taobao demonstrate that
ESAM achieves state-of-the-art performance, especially in the long-tail space.
Besides, we deploy ESAM to the Taobao search engine, leading to significant
improvement on online performance. The code is available at
\url{https://github.com/A-bone1/ESAM.git}
