Analyzing Chinese-english mixed language queries in a web search engine

Abstract

With the increasing number of multilingual web pages on the Internet, multilingual information retrieval has become an important research issue. While queries are the key element of information retrieval process, mixed-language queries have not yet been adequately studied. This study investigates the search topics and user intents of Chinese-English mixed language queries submitted to a Chinese web search engine, and develops a typology of English terms used in those mixed language queries. The preliminary findings show that the category of search topics and distribution of user intents differ from those of monolingual queries reported in previous studies, suggesting a specific searching behavior of Chinese-English mixed language queries users. The findings of this study could provide useful insights in understanding specific searching behavior of Chinese-English mixed language queries users, and inform the construction of controlled vocabularies and cross-lingual query expansion.