Cross-Lingual Sponsored Search via Dual-Encoder and Graph Neural Networks for Context-Aware Query Translation in Advertising Platforms

Abstract

Cross-lingual sponsored search is crucial for global advertising platforms, where users from different language backgrounds interact with multilingual ads. Traditional machine translation methods often fail to capture query-specific contextual cues, leading to semantic ambiguities that negatively impact click-through rates (CTR) and conversion rates (CVR). To address this challenge, we propose AdGraphTrans, a novel dual-encoder framework enhanced with graph neural networks (GNNs) for context-aware query translation in advertising. Specifically, user queries and ad contents are independently encoded using multilingual Transformer-based encoders (mBERT/XLM-R), and contextual relations-such as co-clicked ads, user search sessions, and query-ad co-occurrence-are modeled as a heterogeneous graph. A graph attention network (GAT) is then applied to refine embeddings by leveraging semantic and behavioral context. These embeddings are aligned via contrastive learning to reduce translation ambiguity. Experiments conducted on a cross-lingual sponsored search dataset collected from Google Ads and Amazon Ads (EN-ZH, EN-ES, EN-FR pairs) demonstrate that AdGraphTrans significantly improves query translation quality, achieving a BLEU score of 38.9 and semantic similarity (cosine score) of 0.83, outperforming strong baselines such as mBERT and M2M-100. Moreover, in downstream ad retrieval tasks, AdGraphTrans yields +4.67% CTR and +1.72% CVR improvements over baseline methods. These results confirm that incorporating graph-based contextual signals with dual-encoder translation provides a robust solution for enhancing cross-lingual sponsored search in advertising platforms.