Intent-aware temporal query modeling for keyword suggestion

Abstract

This paper presents a data-driven approach for capturing the temporal variations in user search behaviour by modeling the dynamic query relationships using query-log data. The dependence between different queries (in terms of the query words and latent user intent) is represented using hypergraphs which allows us to explore more complex relationships compared to graph-based approaches. This time-varying dependence is modeled using the framework of probabilistic graphical models. The inferred interactions are used for query keyword suggestion - a key task in web information retrieval. Preliminary experiments using query logs collected from internal search engine of a large health care organization yield promising results. In particular, our model is able to capture temporal variations between queries relationships that reflect known trends in disease occurrence. Further, hypergraph-based modeling captures relationships significantly better compared to graph-based approaches.