Reviews: A Structured Prediction Approach for Label Ranking

Neural Information Processing Systems 

This paper presents an interesting approach to the label ranking problem, by first casting it as a Structured Prediction problem that can be optimized using a surrogate least square methodology, and then demonstrating an embedding representation that captures a couple of common ranking loss functions -- most notable being the Kendall-Tau distance. Overall I liked the paper and found a decent mix of method, theory and experiments (though I would have liked to see more convincing experimentation as further detailed below). In particular I liked the demonstration of the Kendall tau distance and Hamming distances to be representable in this embedding formulation/ That said I had a few concerns with this work as well: - Specifically the empirical results were not very convincing. While this may not have been a problem for a theory-first paper, part of the appeal of an approach like this it is supposed to work in practice. Unfortunately with the current (some what limited) set of experiments I am not entirely convinced. For example: This only looked at a couple of very specific (and not particularly common loss functions) with the evals only measuring Kendall Tau.