On using user query sequence to detect off-topic search

ABSTRACT

Retrieving off-topic documents to a user's pre-defined area of interest via a search engine is potentially a violation of access rights and is a concern to every private, commercial, and governmental organization. We improve content-based off-topic search detection approaches by using a sequence of user queries versus the individual queries. In this approach, we reevaluate how off-topic a query is, based on the sequence of queries that preceded it. Our empirical results show that using the information from the queries in a given query window, the false alarm rate is reduced by a statistically significant amount.

REFERENCES

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.3 INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL
      H.3.3 Information Search and Retrieval

General Terms:
Algorithms, Experimentation, Security

Keywords:
clustering, false alarms, misuse detection, time series