Effective and efficient user interaction for long queries

  • Authors:

  • Giridhar Kumaran;James Allan

  • Affiliations:

  • Microsoft Live Labs, Redmond, WA, USA;University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 31st annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

Handling long queries can involve either pruning the query to retain only the important terms (reduction), or expanding the query to include related concepts (expansion). While automatic techniques to do so exist, roughly 25% performance improvements in terms of MAP have been realized in past work through interactive variants. We show that selectively reducing or expanding a query leads to an average improvement of 51% in MAP over the baseline for standard TREC test collections. We demonstrate how user interaction can be used to achieve this improvement. Most interaction techniques present users with a fixed number of options for all queries. We achieve improvements by interacting less with the user, i.e., we present techniques to identify the optimal number of options to present to users, resulting in an interface with an average of 70% fewer options to consider. Previous algorithms supporting interactive reduction and expansion are exponential in nature. To extend their utility to operational environments, we present techniques to make the complexity of the algorithms polynomial. We finally present an analysis of long queries that continue to exhibit poor performance in spite of our new techniques.