Modeling transactional queries via templates

• Authors: Edward Bortnikov;Pinar Donmez;Amit Kagian;Ronny Lempel
• Venue: ECIR'12 Proceedings of the 34th European conference on Advances in Information Retrieval
• Year: 2012

Search queries have been roughly classified into three categories --- navigational, informational and transactional. The latter group includes queries that aim to perform some Web-mediated task, often by interacting with parameterized Web services. In order to assist users in completing tasks online, one of the first building blocks is identifying whether and which transactional use-case is associated with each query. This paper describes a framework and an algorithm for automatically generating compact representations of queries associated with transactional use cases. We mine search click logs for queries that lead to clicks on pages associated with a use-case, generalize the set of mined queries into templates by replacing query terms with taxonomy categories, and eliminate redundancies. This approach allows associating the use-case with queries unseen in the log sample, while keeping a concise model. Our methodology allows a business owner to select an appropriate operating point that balances the tradeoff between precision and recall. We report the results of an offline evaluation of our framework on three transactional domains, and demonstrate the viability of the approach.