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

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.

User Intent Prediction in Information-seeking Conversations

Conversational assistants are being progressively adopted by the general population. However, they are not capable of handling complicated information-seeking tasks that involve multiple turns of information exchange. Due to the limited communication bandwidth in conversational search, it is important for conversational assistants to accurately detect and predict user intent in information-seeking conversations. In this paper, we investigate two aspects of user intent prediction in an information-seeking setting. First, we extract features based on the content, structural, and sentiment characteristics of a given utterance, and use classic machine learning methods to perform user intent prediction. We then conduct an in-depth feature importance analysis to identify key features in this prediction task. We find that structural features contribute most to the prediction performance. Given this finding, we construct neural classifiers to incorporate context information and achieve better performance without feature engineering. Our findings can provide insights into the important factors and effective methods of user intent prediction in information-seeking conversations.Comment: Accepted to CHIIR 201