  Despite substantial interest in applications of neural networks to
information retrieval, neural ranking models have only been applied to standard
ad hoc retrieval tasks over web pages and newswire documents. This paper
proposes MP-HCNN (Multi-Perspective Hierarchical Convolutional Neural Network)
a novel neural ranking model specifically designed for ranking short social
media posts. We identify document length, informal language, and heterogeneous
relevance signals as features that distinguish documents in our domain, and
present a model specifically designed with these characteristics in mind. Our
model uses hierarchical convolutional layers to learn latent semantic
soft-match relevance signals at the character, word, and phrase levels. A
pooling-based similarity measurement layer integrates evidence from multiple
types of matches between the query, the social media post, as well as URLs
contained in the post. Extensive experiments using Twitter data from the TREC
Microblog Tracks 2011--2014 show that our model significantly outperforms prior
feature-based as well and existing neural ranking models. To our best
knowledge, this paper presents the first substantial work tackling search over
social media posts using neural ranking models.
