Although Web search engines still answer user queries with lists of ten blue links to webpages, people are increasingly issuing queries to accomplish their daily tasks (e. g., finding a recipe, booking a flight, reading online news, etc.). In this work, we propose a two-step methodology for discovering tasks that users try to perform through search engines. First, we identify user tasks from individual user sessions stored in search engine query logs. In our vision, a user task is a set of possibly noncontiguous queries (within a user search session), which refer to the same need. Second, we discover collective tasks by aggregating similar user tasks, possibly performed by distinct users. To discover user tasks, we propose query similarity functions based on unsupervised and supervised learning approaches. We present a set of query clustering methods that exploit these functions in order to detect user tasks. All the proposed solutions were evaluated on a manually-built ground truth, and two of them performed better than state-of-the-art approaches. To detect collective tasks, we propose four methods that cluster previously discovered user tasks, which in turn are represented by the bag-of-words extracted from their composing queries. These solutions were also evaluated on another manually-built ground truth.

Discovering Tasks from Search Engine Query Logs

Lucchese C;Perego R;Silvestri F;
2013

Abstract

Although Web search engines still answer user queries with lists of ten blue links to webpages, people are increasingly issuing queries to accomplish their daily tasks (e. g., finding a recipe, booking a flight, reading online news, etc.). In this work, we propose a two-step methodology for discovering tasks that users try to perform through search engines. First, we identify user tasks from individual user sessions stored in search engine query logs. In our vision, a user task is a set of possibly noncontiguous queries (within a user search session), which refer to the same need. Second, we discover collective tasks by aggregating similar user tasks, possibly performed by distinct users. To discover user tasks, we propose query similarity functions based on unsupervised and supervised learning approaches. We present a set of query clustering methods that exploit these functions in order to detect user tasks. All the proposed solutions were evaluated on a manually-built ground truth, and two of them performed better than state-of-the-art approaches. To detect collective tasks, we propose four methods that cluster previously discovered user tasks, which in turn are represented by the bag-of-words extracted from their composing queries. These solutions were also evaluated on another manually-built ground truth.
2013
Istituto di Scienza e Tecnologie dell'Informazione "Alessandro Faedo" - ISTI
Algorithms
Design
Experimentation
Query log analysis
query clustering
user search intent
user search session boundaries
user tasks
user task discovery
collective tasks
collective task discovery
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14243/265657
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