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44
Learning query intent from regularized click graphs
- In SIGIR 2008
, 2008
"... This work presents the use of click graphs in improving query intent classifiers, which are critical if vertical search and general-purpose search services are to be offered in a unified user interface. Previous works on query classification have primarily focused on improving feature representation ..."
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Cited by 114 (12 self)
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This work presents the use of click graphs in improving query intent classifiers, which are critical if vertical search and general-purpose search services are to be offered in a unified user interface. Previous works on query classification have primarily focused on improving feature representation of queries, e.g., by augmenting queries with search engine results. In this work, we investigate a completely orthogonal approach — instead of enriching feature representation, we aim at drastically increasing the amounts of training data by semi-supervised learning with click graphs. Specifically, we infer class memberships of unlabeled queries from those of labeled ones according to their proximities in a click graph. Moreover, we regularize the learning with click graphs by content-based classification to avoid propagating erroneous labels. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithms in two different applications, product intent and job intent classification. In both cases, we expand the training data with automatically labeled queries by over two orders of magnitude, leading to significant improvements in classification performance. An additional finding is that with a large amount of training data obtained in this fashion, classifiers using only query words/phrases as features can work remarkably well.
Robust Classification of Rare Queries Using Web Knowledge Search
- 179 ― Proceedings of NTCIR-9 Workshop Meeting
, 2007
"... We propose a methodology for building a practical robust query classification system that can identify thousands of query classes with reasonable accuracy, while dealing in real-time with the query volume of a commercial web search en-gine. We use a blind feedback technique: given a query, we determ ..."
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Cited by 68 (11 self)
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We propose a methodology for building a practical robust query classification system that can identify thousands of query classes with reasonable accuracy, while dealing in real-time with the query volume of a commercial web search en-gine. We use a blind feedback technique: given a query, we determine its topic by classifying the web search results retrieved by the query. Motivated by the needs of search ad-vertising, we primarily focus on rare queries, which are the hardest from the point of view of machine learning, yet in ag-gregation account for a considerable fraction of search engine traffic. Empirical evaluation confirms that our methodology yields a considerably higher classification accuracy than pre-viously reported. We believe that the proposed methodology will lead to better matching of online ads to rare queries and overall to a better user experience.
Sources of Evidence for Vertical Selection
"... Web search providers often include search services for domainspecific subcollections, called verticals, such as news, images, videos, job postings, company summaries, and artist profiles. We address the problem of vertical selection, predicting relevant verticals (if any) for queries issued to the s ..."
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Cited by 59 (14 self)
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Web search providers often include search services for domainspecific subcollections, called verticals, such as news, images, videos, job postings, company summaries, and artist profiles. We address the problem of vertical selection, predicting relevant verticals (if any) for queries issued to the search engine’s main web search page. In contrast to prior query classification and resource selection tasks, vertical selection is associated with unique resources that can inform the classification decision. We focus on three sources of evidence: (1) the query string, from which features are derived independent of external resources, (2) logs of queries previously issued directly to the vertical, and (3) corpora representative of vertical content. We focus on 18 different verticals, which differ in terms of semantics, media type, size, and level of query traffic. We compare our method to prior work in federated search and retrieval effectiveness prediction. An in-depth error analysis reveals unique challenges across different verticals and provides insight into vertical selection for future work.
Understanding User’s Query Intent with Wikipedia
- WWW 2009 MADRID! TRACK: SEARCH / SESSION: QUERY CATEGORIZATION
, 2009
"... Understanding the intent behind a user’s query can help search engine to automatically route the query to some corresponding vertical search engines to obtain particularly relevant contents, thus, greatly improving user satisfaction. There are three major challenges to the query intent classificatio ..."
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Cited by 57 (3 self)
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Understanding the intent behind a user’s query can help search engine to automatically route the query to some corresponding vertical search engines to obtain particularly relevant contents, thus, greatly improving user satisfaction. There are three major challenges to the query intent classification problem: (1) Intent representation; (2) Domain coverage and (3) Semantic interpretation. Current approaches to predict the user’s intent mainly utilize machine learning techniques. However, it is difficult and often requires many human efforts to meet all these challenges by the statistical machine learning approaches. In this paper, we propose a general methodology to the problem of query intent classification. With very little human effort, our method can discover large quantities of intent concepts by leveraging Wikipedia, one of the best human knowledge base. The Wikipedia
Search advertising using web relevance feedback
- In Proc 17th. Intl. Conf. on Information and Knowledge Management
, 2008
"... The business of Web search, a $10 billion industry, relies heavily on sponsored search, whereas a few carefully-selected paid advertisements are displayed alongside algorithmic search results. A key technical challenge in sponsored search is to select ads that are relevant for the user’s query. Iden ..."
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Cited by 43 (15 self)
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The business of Web search, a $10 billion industry, relies heavily on sponsored search, whereas a few carefully-selected paid advertisements are displayed alongside algorithmic search results. A key technical challenge in sponsored search is to select ads that are relevant for the user’s query. Identifying relevant ads is challenging because queries are usually very short, and because users, consciously or not, choose terms intended to lead to optimal Web search results and not to optimal ads. Furthermore, the ads themselves are short and usually formulated to capture the reader’s attention rather than to facilitate query matching. Traditionally, matching of ads to queries employed standard information retrieval techniques using the bag of words approach. Here we propose to go beyond the bag of words, and augment both queries and ads with additional knowledgerich features. We use Web search results initially returned for the query to create a pool of relevant documents. Classifying these documents with respect to an external taxonomy and identifying salient named entities give rise to two new feature types. Empirical evaluation based on over 9,000 query-ad pairwise judgments confirms that using augmented queries produces highly relevant ads. Our methodology also relaxes the requirement for each ad to explicitly specify the exhaustive list of queries (“bid phrases”) that can trigger it.
Automatic Classification of Web Queries Using Very Large Unlabeled Query Logs
"... Accurate topical classification of user queries allows for increased effectiveness and efficiency in general-purpose Web search systems. Such classification becomes critical if the system must route queries to a subset of topic-specific and resource-constrained back-end databases. Successful query c ..."
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Cited by 37 (0 self)
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Accurate topical classification of user queries allows for increased effectiveness and efficiency in general-purpose Web search systems. Such classification becomes critical if the system must route queries to a subset of topic-specific and resource-constrained back-end databases. Successful query classification poses a challenging problem, as Web queries are short, thus providing few features. This feature sparseness, coupled with the constantly changing distribution and vocabulary of queries, hinders traditional text classification. We attack this problem by combining multiple classifiers, including exact lookup and partial matching in databases of manually classified frequent queries, linear models trained by supervised learning, and a novel approach based on mining selectional preferences from a large unlabeled query log. Our approach classifies queries without using external sources of information, such as online Web directories or the contents of retrieved pages, making it viable for use in demanding operational environments, such as large-scale Web search services. We evaluate our approach using a large sample of queries from an operational Web search engine and show that our combined method increases recall by nearly 40 % over the best single method while maintaining adequate precision. Additionally, we compare our results to those from the 2005 KDD Cup and find that we perform competitively despite our operational restrictions. This suggests it is possible to topically classify a significant portion of the query stream without requiring external sources of information, allowing for deployment in operationally restricted environments.
Varying approaches to topical web query classification
- Proceedings of the 30th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval
, 2007
"... Topical classification of web queries has drawn recent interest because of the promise it offers in improving retrieval effectiveness and efficiency. However, much of this promise depends on whether classification is performed before or after the query is used to retrieve documents. We examine two p ..."
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Cited by 20 (0 self)
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Topical classification of web queries has drawn recent interest because of the promise it offers in improving retrieval effectiveness and efficiency. However, much of this promise depends on whether classification is performed before or after the query is used to retrieve documents. We examine two previously unaddressed issues in query classification: pre vs. post-retrieval classification effectiveness and the effect of training explicitly from classified queries vs. bridging a classifier trained using a document taxonomy. Bridging classifiers map the categories of a document taxonomy onto those of a query classification problem to provide sufficient training data. We find that training classifiers explicitly from manually classified queries outperforms the bridged classifier by 48 % in F1 score. Also, a pre-retrieval classifier using only the query terms performs merely 11 % worse than the bridged classifier which requires snippets from retrieved documents.
Adaptation of offline vertical selection predictions in the presence of user feedback
- In SIGIR 2009
, 2009
"... Web search results often integrate content from specialized corpora known as verticals. Given a query, one important aspect of aggregated search is the selection of relevant verticals from a set of candidate verticals. One drawback to previous approaches to vertical selection is that methods have no ..."
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Cited by 20 (11 self)
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Web search results often integrate content from specialized corpora known as verticals. Given a query, one important aspect of aggregated search is the selection of relevant verticals from a set of candidate verticals. One drawback to previous approaches to vertical selection is that methods have not explicitly modeled user feedback. However, production search systems often record a variety of feedback information. In this paper, we present algorithms for vertical selection which adapt to user feedback. We evaluate algorithms using a novel simulator which models performance of a vertical selector situated in realistic query traffic.
Classification-Based Resource Selection
"... In some retrieval situations, a system must search across multiple collections. This task, referred to as federated search, occurs for example when searching a distributed index or aggregating content for web search. Resource selection refers to the subtask of deciding, given a query, which collecti ..."
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Cited by 19 (3 self)
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In some retrieval situations, a system must search across multiple collections. This task, referred to as federated search, occurs for example when searching a distributed index or aggregating content for web search. Resource selection refers to the subtask of deciding, given a query, which collections to search. Most existing resource selection methods rely on evidence found in collection content. We present an approach to resource selection that combines multiple sources of evidence to inform the selection decision. We derive evidence from three different sources: collection documents, the topic of the query, and query click-through data. We combine this evidence by treating resource selection as a multiclass machine learning problem. Although machine learned approaches often require large amounts of manually generated training data, we present a method for using automatically generated training data. We make use of and compare against prior resource selection work and evaluate across three experimental testbeds.
Classifying Search Queries Using the Web as a Source of Knowledge ∗
"... We propose a methodology for building a robust query classification system that can identify thousands of query classes, while dealing in real-time with the query volume of a commercial Web search engine. We use a pseudo relevance feedback technique: given a query, we determine its topic by classify ..."
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Cited by 12 (0 self)
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We propose a methodology for building a robust query classification system that can identify thousands of query classes, while dealing in real-time with the query volume of a commercial Web search engine. We use a pseudo relevance feedback technique: given a query, we determine its topic by classifying the Web search results retrieved by the query. Motivated by the needs of search advertising, we primarily focus on rare queries, which are the hardest from the point of view of machine learning, yet in aggregation account for a considerable fraction of search engine traffic. Empirical evaluation confirms that our methodology yields a considerably higher classification accuracy than previously reported. We believe that the proposed methodology will lead to better matching of online ads to rare queries and overall to a better user experience.
