1,239 research outputs found
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
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
You Get What You Chat: Using Conversations to Personalize Search-based Recommendations
Prior work on personalized recommendations has focused on exploiting explicit signals from user-specific queries, clicks, likes, and ratings. This paper investigates tapping into a different source of implicit signals of interests and tastes: online chats between users. The paper develops an expressive model and effective methods for personalizing search-based entity recommendations. User models derived from chats augment different methods for re-ranking entity answers for medium-grained queries. The paper presents specific techniques to enhance the user models by capturing domain-specific vocabularies and by entity-based expansion. Experiments are based on a collection of online chats from a controlled user study covering three domains: books, travel, food. We evaluate different configurations and compare chat-based user models against concise user profiles from questionnaires. Overall, these two variants perform on par in terms of NCDG@20, but each has advantages in certain domains
Context Sensitive Search String Composition Algorithm using User Intention to Handle Ambiguous Keywords
Finding the required URL among the first few result pages of a search engine is still a challenging task. This may require number of reformulations of the search string thus adversely affecting user's search time. Query ambiguity and polysemy are major reasons for not obtaining relevant results in the top few result pages. Efficient query composition and data organization are necessary for getting effective results. Context of the information need and the user intent may improve the autocomplete feature of existing search engines. This research proposes a Funnel Mesh-5 algorithm (FM5) to construct a search string taking into account context of information need and user intention with three main steps 1) Predict user intention with user profiles and the past searches via weighted mesh structure 2) Resolve ambiguity and polysemy of search strings with context and user intention 3) Generate a personalized disambiguated search string by query expansion encompassing user intention and predicted query. Experimental results for the proposed approach and a comparison with direct use of search engine are presented. A comparison of FM5 algorithm with K Nearest Neighbor algorithm for user intention identification is also presented. The proposed system provides better precision for search results for ambiguous search strings with improved identification of the user intention. Results are presented for English language dataset as well as Marathi (an Indian language) dataset of ambiguous search strings.
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
Efficient and Effective Query Auto-Completion
Query Auto-Completion (QAC) is an ubiquitous feature of modern textual search
systems, suggesting possible ways of completing the query being typed by the
user. Efficiency is crucial to make the system have a real-time responsiveness
when operating in the million-scale search space. Prior work has extensively
advocated the use of a trie data structure for fast prefix-search operations in
compact space. However, searching by prefix has little discovery power in that
only completions that are prefixed by the query are returned. This may impact
negatively the effectiveness of the QAC system, with a consequent monetary loss
for real applications like Web Search Engines and eCommerce. In this work we
describe the implementation that empowers a new QAC system at eBay, and discuss
its efficiency/effectiveness in relation to other approaches at the
state-of-the-art. The solution is based on the combination of an inverted index
with succinct data structures, a much less explored direction in the
literature. This system is replacing the previous implementation based on
Apache SOLR that was not always able to meet the required
service-level-agreement.Comment: Published in SIGIR 202
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