Categories Of Queries Research Articles

Impact of query intent and search context on clickthrough behavior in sponsored search

Implicit feedback techniques may be used for query intent detection, taking advantage of user behavior to understand their interests and preferences. In sponsored search, a primary concern is the user’s interest in purchasing or utilizing a commercial service, or what is called online commercial intent. In this paper, we develop a methodology for employing the content of search engine result pages (SERPs), along with the information obtained from query strings, to study characteristics of query intent, with a particular focus on sponsored search. Our work represents a step toward the development and evaluation of an ontology for commercial search, considering queries that reference specific products, brands, and retailers. Characteristics of query categories are studied with respect to aggregated user clickthrough behavior on advertising links. We present a model for clickthrough behavior that considers the influence of such factors as the location of ads and the rank of ads, along with query category. We evaluate our work using a large corpus of clickthrough data obtained from a major commercial search engine. In addition, the impact of query intent is studied on clickthrough rate, where a baseline model and the query intent model are compared for the purpose of calculating an expected ad clickthrough rate. Our findings suggest that query-based features, along with the content of SERPs, are effective in detecting query intent. Factors such as query category, the rank of an ad, and the total number of ads displayed on a result page relate to the context of the ad, rather than its content. We demonstrate that these context-related factors can have a major influence on expected clickthrough rate, suggesting that these factors should be taken into consideration when the performance of an ad is evaluated.

Query Profile Obfuscation by Means of Optimal Query Exchange Between Users

We address the problem of query profile obfuscation by means of partial query exchanges between two users, in order for their profiles of interest to appear distorted to the information provider (database, search engine, etc.). We illustrate a methodology to reach mutual privacy gain, that is, a situation where both users increase their own privacy protection through collaboration in query exchange. To this end, our approach starts with a mathematical formulation, involving the modeling of the users' apparent profiles as probability distributions over categories of interest, and the measure of their privacy as the corresponding Shannon entropy. The question of which query categories to exchange translates into finding optimization variables representing exchange policies, for various optimization objectives based on those entropies, possibly under exchange traffic constraints.

Optimized Cost Model for k-NN Queries in R*-Trees over Random Distribution

Efficient storage and retrieval of multidimensional data in large volumes has become one of the key issues in the design and implementation of commercial and application software. The kind of queries posted on such data is also multifarious. Nearest neighbor queries are one such category and have more significance in GIS type of application. R-tree and its sequel are data partitioned hierarchical multidimensional indexing structures that help in this purpose. Today’s research has turned towards the development of powerful analytical method to predict the performance of such indexing structures such as for varies categories of queries such as range, nearest neighbor, join, etc .This paper focuses on performance of R*-tree for k nearest neighbor (kNN) queries. While general approaches are available in literature that works better for larger k over uniform data, few have explored the impact of small values of k. This paper proposes improved performance analysis model for kNN query for small k over random data. The results are tabulated and compared with existing models, the proposed model out performs the existing models in a significant way for small k

Design factors affecting relevance judgment behaviour in the context of metadata surrogates

This paper reports on the findings of a user study which investigated the effects of structure, highlighting and quantity of information on university students’ interaction with metadata surrogates of learning object repositories (LORs) during the relevance judgement process. The literature review revealed a lack of studies investigating how metadata surrogates should be designed to meet users’ needs and improve the effectiveness of relevance judgement. In order to address this issue, different versions of a prototype system, called META-LOR 2, were developed and evaluated in terms of the time needed for users to find relevant information, the accuracy of their relevance judgements and their satisfaction. To evaluate the prototype, a user study was conducted where participants were asked to complete a set of tasks and fill in satisfaction questionnaires. The findings showed that participants performed better and were more satisfied with those versions of the prototype which highlighted metadata elements that included the query terms, used clusters or categories to organize metadata elements in the surrogates and included metadata elements which were relevant to the query or task at hand. The paper concludes with some recommendations for improving the design of metadata surrogates in search result interfaces.

이미지 검색 과정에 나타난 질의 전환 및 재구성 패턴에 관한 연구

The purpose of this study is to investigate image search query reformulation patterns in relation to image attribute categories. A total of 592 sessions and 2.445 queries from the Excite Web search engine log data were analyzed by utilizing Batley's visual information types and two facets and seven sub-facets of query reformulation patterns. The results of this study are organized with two folds query reformulation and categorical transition. As the most dominant categories of queries are specific and general/nameable, this tendency stays over various search stages. From the perspective of reformulation patterns, while the Parallel movement is the most dominant, there are slight differences depending on initial or preceding query categories. In examining categorical transitions, it was found that 60-80% of search queries were reformulated within the same categories of image attributes. These findings may be applied to practice and implementation of image retrieval systems in terms of assisting users' query term selection and effective thesauri development.

How do virtual visitors get to the library?

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to present an exploratory and preliminary analysis of virtual visitors to the web site of the State Library of Victoria (SLV) in order to enable more understanding about the type of content people are accessing on library web sites.Design/methodology/approachMost of the analysis in this paper is based on web activity data sourced from Hitwise. Different uses of the library web site are investigated as well as the characteristics of the visitors, where they were on the internet before coming to the library web site and where they went afterwards.FindingsQueries on history, places and particular buildings were almost exclusively related to Victorian places or buildings, reflecting the content of the SLV web site. These three categories of query accounted for two fifths of all non‐SLV‐related queries. Most of the analyses presented in this paper have shown little difference over the years 2006‐2008.Research limitations/implicationsOne of the things that is very difficult to gauge from the data is whether the user obtained material of interest from the SLV site. To really find this out, one would need to ask the user directly.Practical implicationsThis analysis will have implications for libraries' management of their online presence.Originality/valueThis paper differs from most papers on web search as it attempts a manual classification of the long tails of upstream web sites, downstream web sites and search queries. This paper will be of interest to anybody interested in the use of library web sites or information search.

Using conditional probabilities for automatic new topic identification

PurposeOne of the most important dimensions of search engine user information seeking behaviour is content‐based behaviour. One of the main elements in developing a personalised intelligent search engine is new topic identification. The purpose of this study is to perform automatic new topic identification in search engine transaction logs using conditional probabilities of new topic arrivals.Design/methodology/approachSample data logs from FAST (currently owned by Yahoo!) and Excite (currently owned by IAC Search & Media) are used in the study. Conditional probabilities of new topic arrivals and topic continuations given query category are used to estimate new topic arrivals.FindingsThe findings of this study show that the conditional probability approach reduced overestimation of topic shifts, increasing some performance measures to their highest ever value compared to previous studies. A straightforward procedure such as the conditional probability approach can be as successful as, and for some measures more successful than, more complex methods applied in previous automatic new topic identification studies.Originality/valueA straightforward procedure that can enable fast automatic new topic identification, a problem not yet solved, and an important step towards personalised search engines.

A study of medical and health queries to web search engines.

This paper reports findings from an analysis of medical or health queries to different web search engines. We report results: (i). comparing samples of 10000 web queries taken randomly from 1.2 million query logs from the AlltheWeb.com and Excite.com commercial web search engines in 2001 for medical or health queries, (ii). comparing the 2001 findings from Excite and AlltheWeb.com users with results from a previous analysis of medical and health related queries from the Excite Web search engine for 1997 and 1999, and (iii). medical or health advice-seeking queries beginning with the word 'should'. Findings suggest: (i). a small percentage of web queries are medical or health related, (ii). the top five categories of medical or health queries were: general health, weight issues, reproductive health and puberty, pregnancy/obstetrics, and human relationships, and (iii). over time, the medical and health queries may have declined as a proportion of all web queries, as the use of specialized medical/health websites and e-commerce-related queries has increased. Findings provide insights into medical and health-related web querying and suggests some implications for the use of the general web search engines when seeking medical/health information.

Bringing together children and books: An initial descriptive study of children's book searching and selection behavior in a digital library

AbstractThis study describes how elementary school students search for and select books using a digital library. This work was done as part of the International Children's Digital Library (ICDL) project in order to explore and discover new directions for the development of digital library interfaces for children ages 3–13. Children used two versions of the ICDL software to search for, select, and read books. We performed a frequency analysis of the number of queries run, books selected, and books opened, and compared book selection rates and book opening rates. Popular query categories and titles selected are tallied. We found differences in book searching and selection behavior, query category preferences, and titles accessed by gender and age and no differences by software version.

Query routing for Web search engines: architecture and experiments

General-purpose search engines such as AltaVista and Lycos are notorious for returning irrelevant results in response to user queries. Consequently, thousands of specialized, topic-specific search engines (from VacationSpot.com to KidsHealth.org) have proliferated on the Web. Typically, topic-specific engines return far better results for `on topic' queries as compared with standard Web search engines. However, it is difficult for the casual user to identify the appropriate specialized engine for any given search. It is more natural for a user to issue queries at a particular Web site, and have these queries automatically routed to the appropriate search engine(s). This paper describes an automatic query routing system called Q-Pilot. Q-Pilot has an off-line component that creates an approximate model of each specialized search engine's topic. On line, Q-Pilot attempts to dynamically route each user query to the appropriate specialized search engines. In our experiments, Q-Pilot was able to identify the appropriate query category 70% of the time. In addition, Q-Pilot picked the best search engine for the query, as one of the top three picks out of its repository of 144 engines, about 40% of the time. This paper reports on Q-Pilot's architecture, the query expansion and clustering algorithms it relies on, and the results of our preliminary experiments.

An Introduction to Geographical Information Systems

Beginning with the discussion of what is GIS, this article explains the concept of geographical data and spatial data models. Two software systems, viz computer-aided design and image processing have been identified as the close relatives of GIS and the similarities and differences between these systems and GIS are described. The operational functions of GIS are described under the categories of data input, analysis, spatial query and data output. Various application areas of GIS alongwith specialized applications of GIS are discussed. Some of the GIS software packages have been mentioned. A brief view has been taken of the state of GIS in India and the article is concluded.

An efficient processing of a chain join with the minimum communication cost in distributed database systems

This paper investigates the optimization problem when executing a join in a distributed database environment. The minimization of the communication cost for sending data through links has been adopted as an optimization criterion. We explore in this paper the approach of judiciously using join operations as reducers in distributed query processing. In general, this problem is computationally intractable. A restriction of the execution of a join in a pre-defined combinatorial order leads to a possible solution in polynomial time. An algorithm for a chain query computation has been proposed in [21]. The time complexity of the algorithm is O(m2n2+m3n), where n is the number of sites in the network, and m is the number of relations (fragments) involved in the join. In this paper, we firstly present a proof of the intuitively well understood fact-that the "eigenorder" of a "chain" join will be the best pre-defined combinatorial order to implement the algorithm in [21]. Secondly, we show a sufficient and necessary condition for a chain query with the eigenordering to be a "simple" query. For the process of the class of simple queries, we show a significant reduction of the time complexity from O(m2n2+m3n) to O(mn+m2). It is encouraging that, in practice, the most frequent queries belong to the category of simple queries.

The Changing Roles of Taxpayer Audit Programs: Some Recent Developments in the Australian Taxation Office

This paper reviews some of the concerns raised in the recent report by the Joint Committee of Public Accounts in respect of the Australian Taxation Office’s Taxpayer Audit Group. It examines the audit-based risk managmenet strategy being applied to two particular categories of business taxpayers and queries the validity of the concerns raised.

Countercurrents: On the Primacy of Texts in Literary Criticism (review)

Reviews161 increasingly resembles another great original, the American critic Kenneth Burke. Burke's books are often wonderfully absorbing; like Derrida, he travels freely from one discipline and body of texts to others, and picks on all manner of authors and topics for his meditations. But whatever the apparent subject, Burke's real subject is always himself—Burkology, as one admirer has termed it, just as perhaps Derrida's subject is, invariably, Derridology. To say this is, first of all, a tribute to the place that Derrida occupies on the intellectual scene. There are very few writers like him, very few whose names evoke and represent an entire network of discourse. But the transformation of Derrida into a subject also means that he no longer affects the general theory and practice of criticism as he once did. His early essays and books—above all, of course, Of Grammatology—changed literary studies for the better by encouraging critics, teachers, and students to query categories and distinctions they had taken for granted as normal, natural, obvious. Derrida himself said almost nothing in this early work about race, class, gender, and ethnicity, and nothing about "opening up" the literary canon. But he impelled readers to consider what the traditional topics and canons of literature and criticism had marginalized and excluded, had committed to silence or designated as "other." More than anyone else, including Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault, Derrida moved criticism toward exciting new areas for analysis and research, areas that are now at the center of literary studies and that, paradoxically, are now more powerfully engaging than the writings by Derrida that Acts ofLiterature assembles . Wellesley CollegeWilliam E. Cain Countercurrents: On the Primacy of Texts in Literary Criticism , edited by Raymond Adolph Prier; ix & 302 pp. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992, $54.50 cloth, $17.95 paper. Countercurrents: On the Primacy of Texts in Literary Criticism is a collection of fifteen new essays on a wide variety of topics. Several essays address broad patterns of influence—Kafka's use of Dante, Petrarch's role in shaping modern literary history; others are concerned with single authors and isolated works— the poetry of Saint-John Perse, Kleists TL· Beggarwoman ofLocarno; and others take up more abstract, theoretical questions—Peircean semiotics and its possible applications in literary criticism. As this partial survey suggests, the essays in the collection share no transparent methodological, temporal, or linguistic com- 162Philosophy and Literature munality. Yet Prier maintains that the collection has a clear, even provocative message: the authors of these essays "dare to address a once acknowledged, but now decidedly unpopular assumption: the primacy of texts in literary criticism" (p. 1). Prier's introduction is far and away the most polemical section of the book. In prose that oscillates between the celebratory and the inflammatory, Prier praises texts ("a text helps us along, gives us a hand, provides us a boost") and vilifies those critics who would "deny our positive, experiential participation in these texts" (p. 8). It is not altogether clear whom exacdy Prier has in mind when he contemns the "anti-humanistic arguments of sophistic exegetes" but the group would seem to include Derrida (or at least the Derridean "epigones ofthe eighties and nineties") and the "postmodern exegetes ofNietzsche, Freud, and Marx" who endorse a "psychologically negative hermeneutics ofsuspicion." What links, presumably, the essays in Countercurrents is a common respect for the humanistic possibilities of reading, possibilities grounded in the "authority shared between a text and its reader and, ultimately, among a text, its reader, and its author" (p. 3). The essays are divided into five sections: "The Theoretical Hyphen," "Lo, the Text Tells Its Tale," "Appearing Texts," "Reflected Texts Beyond Words," and "A Cultural-Historical Hyphen." Of these sections, only the first and fifth possess more than a nominal unity. Grouped in the first section, are the collection 's two most theoretical essays: an essay by E. F. Kaelin on the StructuralistPoststructuralist controversy and an essay by WilliamJ. Kennedy on Nietzsche's engagement with the rhetorical practices of ancient Greece. In the final section are four essays focusing on Petrarch and Dante by Aldo Scaglione, Maristella de Panizza Lorch, Alien Mandelbaum, and Prier. Among the...

Consistency in Adverse Event Terminology: Merck's Modified Clinterm

A coordinated dictionary system has been developed by Merck Research Laboratories to improve the consistency of terminology used to code both pre- and postmarketing adverse event reports. This dictionary, referred to as CLINTERM, was compiled by harmonizing separate vocabularies previously used for clinical trials and regulatory reporting. The redesigned dictionary, which is used for clinical research and regulatory applications worldwide, features preferred term classifications, an extensive vocabulary of “actual” terms, and customized query categories. It will also incorporate WHO ART and COSTAT translations. Coding and data entry are simplified by entry of the verbatim reported term with automatic mapping to the encoded preferred term. To maintain the integrity of the dictionary, and assure timely and appropriate maintenance, proposed additions and changes are evaluated cooperatively by medical representatives of each user group.

In their own words: an examination of catalogue users' subject queries

As part of a recent research project a large set of catalogue users' subject queries was collected hy interview The libraries and the data collection procedures are briefly described. The query set obtained has been divided into several general categories which illustrate the range of types of subject search being performed. Each category of query is discussed, with a consideration of the problems which face the user in carrying out each type of search Possible solutions to some of these problems are considered The most important issue is the variation in specificity of the queries, whilst other issues relate to the users' expression of need. access to spe cific types of materials, interdisciplinary subjects, and map propriate queries. These issues are summarised and the impli cations for OPAC design are discussed.

The experience of a department of medicine with a clinical medical library service.

Five years of experience using the services of a full-time clinical medical librarian (CML) by the Department of Medicine at the Hospital of the Medical College of Pennsylvania have been reviewed. Over the five years there was a marked increase in queries from faculty and house staff members with an accompanying decrease in CML-initiated questions, while requests by students and others remained constant. The largest category of queries was patient-related. There were increases in the use of the CML for patient-related queries, for research, and for oral presentations. The number of requests obtained on rounds or in conferences decreased, while the number obtained by phone, in the library, or elsewhere increased. Requests for computer searches remained constant.

Reality and expectation of the British National Health Service Consumer*

On the analysis of some 40 000 letters received each year, the author, a medical journalist, has identified nine main categories of queries about health care problems which are not adequately dealt with by the British National Health Services. The problems are concerned with anatomy and physiology, illness, pregnancy and childbirth, contraception, child care, mental health, the old and plastic surgery. By focusing on these unmet needs, a plea is made to rectify the matter.