Tempo-lexical context drivenword embedding for cross-session search task extraction

Abstract

Search task extraction in information retrieval is the process of identifying search intents over a set of queries relating to the same topical information need. Search tasks may potentially span across multiple search sessions. Most existing research on search task extraction has focused on identifying tasks within a single session, where the notion of a session is defined by a fixed length time window. By contrast, in this work we seek to identify tasks that span across multiple sessions. To identify tasks, we conduct a global analysis of a query log in its entirety without restricting analysis to individual temporal windows. To capture inherent task semantics, we represent queries as vectors in an abstract space. We learn the embedding of query words in this space by leveraging the temporal and lexical contexts of queries. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed query embedding, we conduct experiments of clustering queries into tasks with a particular interest of measuring the cross-session search task recall. Results of our experiments demonstrate that task extraction effectiveness, including cross-session recall, is improved significantly with the help of our proposed method of embedding the query terms by leveraging the temporal and templexical contexts of queries.