Track: Search
Paper Title:
Query Topic Detection for Reformulation
Authors:
Abstract:
In this paper, we show that most multiple term queries include
more than one topic and users usually reformulate their queries by
topics instead of terms. In order to provide empirical evidence on
users reformulation behavior and to help search engines better
handle the query reformulation problem, we focus on detecting
internal topics in the original query and analyzing users
reformulation to those topics in this paper. We utilize the
Interaction Information (II) to measure the degree of one subquery
being a topic based on the local search results. The
experimental results on query log show that: most users
reformulate query at the topical level; and our proposed II-based
algorithm is a good method to detect topics from original queries.
