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Automatic identification of user goals in Web search

Published 1 January 2005
Uichin Lee, Zhenyu Liu, Junghoo Cho
Citations403

TL;DR

This paper presents the results from a human subject study that strongly indicate the feasibility of automatic query-goal identification, and proposes two types of features for the goal-identification task: user-click behavior and anchor-link distribution.

Abstract

There has been recent interests in studying the "goal" behind a user's Web query, so that this goal can be used to improve the quality of a search engine's results. Previous studies have mainly focused on using manual query-log investigation to identify Web query goals. In this paper we study whether and how we can automate this goal-identification process. We first present our results from a human subject study that strongly indicate the feasibility of automatic query-goal identification. We then propose two types of features for the goal-identification task: user-click behavior and anchor-link distribution. Our experimental evaluation shows that by combining these features we can correctly identify the goals for 90% of the queries studied.

Keywords

Computer Science