Automatic query taxonomy generation for information retrieval applications

Abstract

It is crucial for information retrieval systems to learn more about what users search for in order to fulfil the intent of searches. This paper introduces query taxonomy generation, which attempts to organise users’ queries into a hierarchical structure of topic classes. Such a query taxonomy provides a basis for the in‐depth analysis of users’ queries on a larger scale and can benefit many information retrieval systems. The proposed approach to this problem consists of two computational processes: hierarchical query clustering to generate a query taxonomy from scratch, and query categorisation to place newly‐arrived queries into the taxonomy. The results of the preliminary experiment have shown the potential of the proposed approach in generating taxonomies for queries, which may be useful in various Web information retrieval applications.