Increasing stability of result organization for session search

Abstract

Search result clustering (SRC) organizes search results into labeled hierarchical structures as an "information lay-of-land", providing users an overview and helping them quickly locate relevant information from piles of search results. Hierarchies built by this process are usually sensitive to query changes. For search sessions with multiple queries, this could be undesirable since it may leave users a seemly random overview and partly diminish the benefits that SRC intents to offer. We propose to integrate external knowledge from Wikipedia when building concept hierarchies to boost their stability for session queries. Our evaluations on both TREC 2010 and 2011 Session tracks demonstrate that the proposed approaches outperform the state-of-the-art hierarchy construction algorithms in stability of search results organization. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.