Query phrase suggestion from topically tagged session logs

Abstract

Searchers' difficulty in formulating effective queries for their information needs is well known. Analysis of search session logs shows that users often pose short, vague queries and then struggle with revising them. Interactive query expansion (users selecting terms to add to their queries) dramatically improves effectiveness and satisfaction. Suggesting relevant candidate expansion terms based on the initial query enables users to satisfy their information needs faster. We find that suggesting query phrases other users have found it necessary to add for a given query (mined from session logs) dramatically improves the quality of suggestions over simply using cooccurrence. However, this exacerbates the sparseness problem faced when mining short queries that lack features. To mitigate this, we tag query phrases with higher level topical categories to mine more general rules, finding that this enables us to make suggestions for approximately 10% more queries while maintaining an acceptable false positive rate. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.