Automatic web query classification using labeled and unlabeled training data

ABSTRACT

Accurate topical categorization of user queries allows for increased effectiveness, efficiency, and revenue potential in general-purpose web search systems. Such categorization becomes critical if the system is to return results not just from a general web collection but from topic-specific databases as well. Maintaining sufficient categorization recall is very difficult as web queries are typically short, yielding few features per query. We examine three approaches to topical categorization of general web queries: matching against a list of manually labeled queries, supervised learning of classifiers, and mining of selectional preference rules from large unlabeled query logs. Each approach has its advantages in tackling the web query classification recall problem, and combining the three techniques allows us to classify a substantially larger proportion of queries than any of the individual techniques. We examine the performance of each approach on a real web query stream and show that our combined method accurately classifies 46% of queries, outperforming the recall of the best single approach by nearly 20%, with a 7% improvement in overall effectiveness.

REFERENCES

• 1: Luis Gravano , Vasileios Hatzivassiloglou , Richard Lichtenstein, Categorizing web queries according to geographical locality, Proceedings of the twelfth international conference on Information and knowledge management, November 03-08, 2003, New Orleans, LA, USA [doi>10.1145/956863.956925]
• 2: In-Ho Kang , GilChang Kim, Query type classification for web document retrieval, Proceedings of the 26th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in informaion retrieval, July 28-August 01, 2003, Toronto, Canada [doi>10.1145/860435.860449]
• 3: Christopher D. Manning , Hinrich Schütze, Foundations of statistical natural language processing, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1999
• 4: Philip Stuart Resnik, Selection and information: a class-based approach to lexical relationships, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, 1993

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.3 INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL
      H.3.5 On-line Information Services
          Subjects: Web-based services

General Terms:
Algorithms, Experimentation

Keywords:
query classification, web search