A New Algorithm for Inferring User Search Goals with Feedback Sessions

作者：Lu, Zheng^*; Zha, Hongyuan; Yang, Xiaokang; Lin, Weiyao; Zheng, Zhaohui

来源：IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, 2013, 25(3): 502-513.

DOI：10.1109/TKDE.2011.248

• User search goals
• feedback sessions
• pseudo-documents
• restructuring search results
• classified average precision

For a broad-topic and ambiguous query, different users may have different search goals when they submit it to a search engine. The inference and analysis of user search goals can be very useful in improving search engine relevance and user experience. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to infer user search goals by analyzing search engine query logs. First, we propose a framework to discover different user search goals for a query by clustering the proposed feedback sessions. Feedback sessions are constructed from user click-through logs and can efficiently reflect the information needs of users. Second, we propose a novel approach to generate pseudo-documents to better represent the feedback sessions for clustering. Finally, we propose a new criterion "Classified Average Precision (CAP)" to evaluate the performance of inferring user search goals. Experimental results are presented using user click-through logs from a commercial search engine to validate the effectiveness of our proposed methods.

• 出版日期2013-3
• 单位上海交通大学