Analysis of an expert search query log

Abstract

Expert search has made rapid progress in modeling, algorithms and evaluations in the recent years. However, there is very few work on analyzing how users interact with expert search systems. In this paper, we conduct analysis of an expert search query log. The aim is to understand the special characteristics of expert search usage. To the best of our knowledge, this is one of the earliest work on expert search query log analysis. We find that expert search users generally issue shorter queries, more common queries, and use more advanced search features, with fewer queries in a session, than general Web search users do. This study explores a new research direction in expert search by analyzing and exploiting query logs.