The role of query sessions in extracting instance attributes from web search queries

Abstract

Per-instance attributes are acquired using a weakly supervised extraction method which exploits anonymized Web-search query sessions, as an alternative to isolated, individual queries. Examples of these attributes are top speed for chevrolet corvette, or population density for brazil). Inherent challenges associated with using sessions for attribute extraction, such as a large majority of within-session queries not being related to attributes, are overcome by using attributes globally extracted from isolated queries as an unsupervised filtering mechanism. In a head-to-head qualitative comparison, the ranked lists of attributes generated by merging attributes extracted from query sessions, on one hand, and from isolated queries, on another hand, are about 12% more accurate on average, than the attributes extracted from isolated queries by a previous method. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.