STUDY ON A NEW ALGORITHM FOR INFERRING USER SEARCH GOALS WITH FEEDBACK SESSIONS

For a broad-topic and ambiguous query, dif erent users may have dif erent 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 dif erent 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. Experimentalresults are presented using user click-through logs from a commercial search engine to validate the effectiveness of our proposed methods