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Exploring session context using distributed representations of queries and reformulations
- In In Proc. of SIGIR
, 2015
"... ABSTRACT Search logs contain examples of frequently occurring patterns of user reformulations of queries. Intuitively, the reformulation "san francisco" → "san francisco 49ers" is semantically similar to "detroit" → "detroit lions". Likewise, "london&quo ..."
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ABSTRACT Search logs contain examples of frequently occurring patterns of user reformulations of queries. Intuitively, the reformulation "san francisco" → "san francisco 49ers" is semantically similar to "detroit" → "detroit lions". Likewise, "london" → "things to do in london" and "new york" → "new york tourist attractions" can also be considered similar transitions in intent. The reformulation "movies" → "new movies" and "york" → "new york", however, are clearly different despite the lexical similarities in the two reformulations. In this paper, we study the distributed representation of queries learnt by deep neural network models, such as the Convolutional Latent Semantic Model, and show that they can be used to represent query reformulations as vectors. These reformulation vectors exhibit favourable properties such as mapping semantically and syntactically similar query changes closer in the embedding space. Our work is motivated by the success of continuous space language models in capturing relationships between words and their meanings using offset vectors. We demonstrate a way to extend the same intuition to represent query reformulations. Furthermore, we show that the distributed representations of queries and reformulations are both useful for modelling session context for query prediction tasks, such as for query auto-completion (QAC) ranking. Our empirical study demonstrates that short-term (session) history context features based on these two representations improves the mean reciprocal rank (MRR) for the QAC ranking task by more than 10% over a supervised ranker baseline. Our results also show that by using features based on both these representations together we achieve a better performance, than either of them individually.
Struggling and Success in Web Search
"... ABSTRACT Web searchers sometimes struggle to find relevant information. Struggling leads to frustrating and dissatisfying search experiences, even if searchers ultimately meet their search objectives. Better understanding of search tasks where people struggle is important in improving search system ..."
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ABSTRACT Web searchers sometimes struggle to find relevant information. Struggling leads to frustrating and dissatisfying search experiences, even if searchers ultimately meet their search objectives. Better understanding of search tasks where people struggle is important in improving search systems. We address this important issue using a mixed methods study using large-scale logs, crowd-sourced labeling, and predictive modeling. We analyze anonymized search logs from the Microsoft Bing Web search engine to characterize aspects of struggling searches and better explain the relationship between struggling and search success. To broaden our understanding of the struggling process beyond the behavioral signals in log data, we develop and utilize a crowd-sourced labeling methodology. We collect third-party judgments about why searchers appear to struggle and, if appropriate, where in the search task it became clear to the judges that searches would succeed (i.e., the pivotal query). We use our findings to propose ways in which systems can help searchers reduce struggling. Key components of such support are algorithms that accurately predict the nature of future actions and their anticipated impact on search outcomes. Our findings have implications for the design of search systems that help searchers struggle less and succeed more.
0 Search and Breast Cancer: On Episodic Shifts of Attention over Life Histories of an Illness
, 2016
"... We seek to understand the evolving needs of people who are faced with a life-changing medical diagnosis based on analyses of queries extracted from an anonymized search query log. Focusing on breast cancer, we manually tag a set of Web searchers as showing patterns of search behavior consistent wit ..."
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We seek to understand the evolving needs of people who are faced with a life-changing medical diagnosis based on analyses of queries extracted from an anonymized search query log. Focusing on breast cancer, we manually tag a set of Web searchers as showing patterns of search behavior consistent with someone grappling with the screening, diagnosis, and treatment of breast cancer. We build and apply probabilistic classifiers to detect these searchers from multiple sessions and to identify the timing of diagnosis using temporal and statistical features. We explore the changes in information-seeking over time before and after an inferred diagnosis of breast cancer by aligning multiple searchers by the estimated time of diagnosis. We employ the classifier to automatically identify 1700 candidate searchers with an estimated 90% precision, and we predict the day of diagnosis within 15 days with an 88% accuracy. We show that the geographic and demographic attributes of searchers identified with high probability are strongly correlated with ground truth of reported incidence rates. We then analyze the content of queries over time for inferred cancer patients, using a detailed ontology of cancer-related search terms. The analysis reveals the rich temporal structure of the evolving queries of people likely diagnosed with breast cancer. Finally, we focus on subtypes of illness based on inferred stages of cancer and show clinically relevant dynamics of information seeking based on the dominant stage expressed by searchers.
