Mining term association patterns from search logs for effective query reformulation

ABSTRACT

Search engine logs are an emerging new type of data that offers interesting opportunities for data mining. Existing work on mining such data has mostly attempted to discover knowledge at the level of queries (e.g., query clusters). In this paper, we propose to mine search engine logs for patterns at the level of terms through analyzing the relations of terms inside a query. We define two novel term association patterns (i.e., context-sensitive term substitutions and term additions) and propose new methods for mining such patterns from search engine logs. These two patterns can be used to address the mis-specification and under-specification problems of ineffective queries. Experiment results on real search engine logs show that the mined context-sensitive term substitutions can be used to effectively reword queries and improve their accuracy, while the mined context-sensitive term addition patterns can be used to support query refinement in a more effective way.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.3 INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL
      H.3.1 Content Analysis and Indexing
          Subjects: Linguistic processing

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.3 INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL
      H.3.3 Information Search and Retrieval
          Subjects: Search process; Query formulation

General Terms:
Algorithms

Keywords:
query reformulation, search log mining, term association patterns