An empirical study of query specificity

Authors:
Avi Arampatzis;Jaap Kamps
Affiliations:
Electrical and Computer Engineering, Democritus University of Thrace, Greece;Media Studies, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Venue:
ECIR'2010 Proceedings of the 32nd European conference on Advances in Information Retrieval
Year:
2010

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Abstract

We analyse the statistical behavior of query-associated quantities in query-logs, namely, the sum and mean of IDF of query terms, otherwise known as query specificity and query mean specificity. We narrow down the possibilities for modeling their distributions to gamma, log-normal, or log-logistic, depending on query length and on whether the sum or the mean is considered. The results have applications in query performance prediction and artificial query generation.