3,534 research outputs found
Intent Models for Contextualising and Diversifying Query Suggestions
The query suggestion or auto-completion mechanisms help users to type less
while interacting with a search engine. A basic approach that ranks suggestions
according to their frequency in the query logs is suboptimal. Firstly, many
candidate queries with the same prefix can be removed as redundant. Secondly,
the suggestions can also be personalised based on the user's context. These two
directions to improve the aforementioned mechanisms' quality can be in
opposition: while the latter aims to promote suggestions that address search
intents that a user is likely to have, the former aims to diversify the
suggestions to cover as many intents as possible. We introduce a
contextualisation framework that utilises a short-term context using the user's
behaviour within the current search session, such as the previous query, the
documents examined, and the candidate query suggestions that the user has
discarded. This short-term context is used to contextualise and diversify the
ranking of query suggestions, by modelling the user's information need as a
mixture of intent-specific user models. The evaluation is performed offline on
a set of approximately 1.0M test user sessions. Our results suggest that the
proposed approach significantly improves query suggestions compared to the
baseline approach.Comment: A short version of this paper was presented at CIKM 201
Why People Search for Images using Web Search Engines
What are the intents or goals behind human interactions with image search
engines? Knowing why people search for images is of major concern to Web image
search engines because user satisfaction may vary as intent varies. Previous
analyses of image search behavior have mostly been query-based, focusing on
what images people search for, rather than intent-based, that is, why people
search for images. To date, there is no thorough investigation of how different
image search intents affect users' search behavior.
In this paper, we address the following questions: (1)Why do people search
for images in text-based Web image search systems? (2)How does image search
behavior change with user intent? (3)Can we predict user intent effectively
from interactions during the early stages of a search session? To this end, we
conduct both a lab-based user study and a commercial search log analysis.
We show that user intents in image search can be grouped into three classes:
Explore/Learn, Entertain, and Locate/Acquire. Our lab-based user study reveals
different user behavior patterns under these three intents, such as first click
time, query reformulation, dwell time and mouse movement on the result page.
Based on user interaction features during the early stages of an image search
session, that is, before mouse scroll, we develop an intent classifier that is
able to achieve promising results for classifying intents into our three intent
classes. Given that all features can be obtained online and unobtrusively, the
predicted intents can provide guidance for choosing ranking methods immediately
after scrolling
A Hierarchical Recurrent Encoder-Decoder For Generative Context-Aware Query Suggestion
Users may strive to formulate an adequate textual query for their information
need. Search engines assist the users by presenting query suggestions. To
preserve the original search intent, suggestions should be context-aware and
account for the previous queries issued by the user. Achieving context
awareness is challenging due to data sparsity. We present a probabilistic
suggestion model that is able to account for sequences of previous queries of
arbitrary lengths. Our novel hierarchical recurrent encoder-decoder
architecture allows the model to be sensitive to the order of queries in the
context while avoiding data sparsity. Additionally, our model can suggest for
rare, or long-tail, queries. The produced suggestions are synthetic and are
sampled one word at a time, using computationally cheap decoding techniques.
This is in contrast to current synthetic suggestion models relying upon machine
learning pipelines and hand-engineered feature sets. Results show that it
outperforms existing context-aware approaches in a next query prediction
setting. In addition to query suggestion, our model is general enough to be
used in a variety of other applications.Comment: To appear in Conference of Information Knowledge and Management
(CIKM) 201
Learning to Attend, Copy, and Generate for Session-Based Query Suggestion
Users try to articulate their complex information needs during search
sessions by reformulating their queries. To make this process more effective,
search engines provide related queries to help users in specifying the
information need in their search process. In this paper, we propose a
customized sequence-to-sequence model for session-based query suggestion. In
our model, we employ a query-aware attention mechanism to capture the structure
of the session context. is enables us to control the scope of the session from
which we infer the suggested next query, which helps not only handle the noisy
data but also automatically detect session boundaries. Furthermore, we observe
that, based on the user query reformulation behavior, within a single session a
large portion of query terms is retained from the previously submitted queries
and consists of mostly infrequent or unseen terms that are usually not included
in the vocabulary. We therefore empower the decoder of our model to access the
source words from the session context during decoding by incorporating a copy
mechanism. Moreover, we propose evaluation metrics to assess the quality of the
generative models for query suggestion. We conduct an extensive set of
experiments and analysis. e results suggest that our model outperforms the
baselines both in terms of the generating queries and scoring candidate queries
for the task of query suggestion.Comment: Accepted to be published at The 26th ACM International Conference on
Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM2017
Fast Data in the Era of Big Data: Twitter's Real-Time Related Query Suggestion Architecture
We present the architecture behind Twitter's real-time related query
suggestion and spelling correction service. Although these tasks have received
much attention in the web search literature, the Twitter context introduces a
real-time "twist": after significant breaking news events, we aim to provide
relevant results within minutes. This paper provides a case study illustrating
the challenges of real-time data processing in the era of "big data". We tell
the story of how our system was built twice: our first implementation was built
on a typical Hadoop-based analytics stack, but was later replaced because it
did not meet the latency requirements necessary to generate meaningful
real-time results. The second implementation, which is the system deployed in
production, is a custom in-memory processing engine specifically designed for
the task. This experience taught us that the current typical usage of Hadoop as
a "big data" platform, while great for experimentation, is not well suited to
low-latency processing, and points the way to future work on data analytics
platforms that can handle "big" as well as "fast" data
Theory-based user modeling for personalized interactive information retrieval
In an effort to improve users’ search experiences during their information seeking process, providing a personalized information retrieval system is proposed to be one of the effective approaches. To personalize the search systems requires a good understanding of the users. User modeling has been approved to be a good method for learning and representing users. Therefore many user modeling studies have been carried out and some user models have been developed. The majority of the user modeling studies applies inductive approach, and only small number of studies employs deductive approach. In this paper, an EISE (Extended Information goal, Search strategy and Evaluation threshold) user model is proposed, which uses the deductive approach based on psychology theories and an existing user model. Ten users’ interactive search log obtained from the real search engine is applied to validate the proposed user model. The preliminary validation results show that the EISE model can be applied to identify different types of users. The search preferences of the different user types can be applied to inform interactive search system design and development
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