Query Logs Research Articles

Semantic-based Recommendation Tool for Library Management System using Domain Specific Ontology

Semantic search plays a vital role for improving the output of information retrieval in today’s scenario. Users those who want to find the necessary information always feel comfortable to submit queries based on related keywords to the search engine. But, the major drawback of submitting keyword query is ambiguity. So, we are moving to semantic based search. Many traditional approaches like semantic search depending on ontology encourages user to type a formal language query. Most of the novice users are not aware of formal query languages. To resolve the above drawback and enhance the retrieval effectiveness, a semantic based recommendation tool using domain specific ontology is proposed. And also to solve the limitations of usability, a query interface has to be provided to the users in which the users can enter the natural language query. To implement this semantic based recommendation tool, a domain-specific ontology is used through which accurate search results can be achieved. This Query Recommendation tool is proposed for Library Management System which uses Library Ontology for Query Recommendation. This tool compares the input query given by the user related to Library with the Library ontology and other possible queries which are related to the user query are generated from the ontology based on different entities and relationship. The queries which are extracted from the ontology using entities and properties along with query log are recommended alternative to the user’s initial query. Since, the queries are extracted based on the semantics by which the concepts related to the user query are revealed, more relevant information is retrieved which leads to user satisfaction.

A convolutional neural network-based model for knowledge base completion and its application to search personalization

In this paper, we propose a novel embedding model, named ConvKB, for knowledge base completion. Our model ConvKB advances state-of-the-art models by employing a convolutional neural network, so that it can capture global relationships and transitional characteristics between entities and relations in knowledge bases. In ConvKB, each triple (head entity, relation, tail entity) is represented as a 3-column matrix where each column vector represents a triple element. This 3-column matrix is then fed to a convolution layer where multiple filters are operated on the matrix to generate different feature maps. These feature maps are then concatenated into a single feature vector representing the input triple. The feature vector is multiplied with a weight vector via a dot product to return a score. This score is then used to predict whether the triple is valid or not. Experiments show that ConvKB obtains better link prediction and triple classification results than previous state-of-the-art models on benchmark datasets WN18RR, FB15k-237, WN11 and FB13. We further apply our ConvKB to a search personalization problem which aims to tailor the search results to each specific user based on the user’s personal interests and preferences. In particular, we model the potential relationship between the submitted query, the user and the search result (i.e., document) as a triple (query, user, document) on which the ConvKB is able to work. Experimental results on query logs from a commercial web search engine show that ConvKB achieves better performances than the standard ranker as well as strong search personalization baselines.

Cohort-based personalized query auto-completion

Query auto-completion (QAC) facilitates query formulation by predicting completions for given query prefix inputs. Most web search engines use behavioral signals to customize query completion lists for users. To be effective, such personalized QAC models rely on the access to sufficient context about each user’s interest and intentions. Hence, they often suffer from data sparseness problems. For this reason, we propose the construction and application of cohorts to address context sparsity and to enhance QAC personalization. We build an individual’s interest profile by learning his/her topic preferences through topic models and then aggregate users who share similar profiles. As conventional topic models are unable to automatically learn cohorts, we propose two cohort topic models that handle topic modeling and cohort discovery in the same framework. We present four cohort-based personalized QAC models that employ four different cohort discovery strategies. Our proposals use cohorts’ contextual information together with query frequency to rank completions. We perform extensive experiments on the publicly available AOL query log and compare the ranking effectiveness with that of models that discard cohort contexts. Experimental results suggest that our cohort-based personalized QAC models can solve the sparseness problem and yield significant relevance improvement over competitive baselines.

An analytical study of large SPARQL query logs

An analytical study of large SPARQL query logs

ObSecure Logging (OSLo): A Framework to Protect and Evaluate the Web Search Privacy in Health Care Domain

Users around the world send queries to the Web Search Engine (WSE) to retrieve data from the Internet. Users usually take primary assistance relating to medical information from WSE via search queries. The search queries relating to diseases and treatment is contemplated to be the most personal facts about the user. The search queries often contain identifiable information that can be linked back to the originator, which can compromise the privacy of a user. In this work, we are proposing a distributed privacy-preserving protocol (OSLo) that eliminates limitation in the existing distributed privacy-preserving protocols and a framework, which evaluates the privacy of a user. The OSLo framework asses the local privacy relative to the group of users involved in forwarding query to the WSE and the profile privacy against the profiling of WSE. The privacy analysis shows that the local privacy of a user directly depends on the size of the group and inversely on the number of compromised users. We have performed experiments to evaluate the profile privacy of a user using a privacy metric Profile Exposure Level. The OSLo is simulated with a subset of 1000 users of the AOL query log. The results show that OSLo performs better than the benchmark privacy-preserving protocol on the basis of privacy and delay. Additionally, results depict that the privacy of a user depends on the size of the group.

User behaviour pattern for online learning system: UiTM iLearn portal case

<span>A Web server log files contain an entire record of the user’s browsing history such as referrer, date and time access, path, operating system (OS), browser and IP address. User navigation pattern discovery involves learning of user’s browsing behaviour to gain the pattern from web server log file. This paper emphasizes on identifying user navigation pattern from web server log file data of iLearn portal. The study implements the framework for user navigation including phases of acquisition of weblog, log query parser, preprocessor, navigational pattern modelling, clustering, and classification. This study is conducted in the context of the actual data logs of the iLearn portal of Universiti Teknologi MARA (UiTM). This study revealed the navigational patterns of online learners which relatively related to their intake or group along the semester of 14 weeks. Besides, access patterns for students along the semester are different and can be classified into three (3) quarter, namely Q1, Q2 and Q3 based on the total of week per semester. Future work will focus on the development of prototype to improve the security of online learning especially during the assessment progress such as online quiz, test and examination.</span>

Hierarchical neural query suggestion with an attention mechanism

Query suggestions help users of a search engine to refine their queries. Previous work on query suggestion has mainly focused on incorporating directly observable features such as query co-occurrence and semantic similarity. The structure of such features is often set manually, as a result of which hidden dependencies between queries and users may be ignored. We propose an Attention-based Hierarchical Neural Query Suggestion (AHNQS) model that uses an attention mechanism to automatically capture user preferences. AHNQS combines a session-level neural network and a user-level neural network into a hierarchical structure to model the short- and long-term search history of a user. We quantify the improvements of AHNQS over state-of-the-art recurrent neural network-based query suggestion baselines on the AOL query log dataset, with improvements of up to 9.66% and 12.51% in terms of Recall@10 and MRR@10, respectively; improvements are especially obvious for short sessions and inactive users with few search sessions.

Schema matching based on SQL statements

Schema matching is a critical step in numerous database applications such as web data sources integrating, data warehouse loading and information exchanging among several authorities. In this paper, we propose to exploit the similarities of the SQL statements in the query logs to find the correspondences between attributes in the schemas to be matched. We discover three kinds of similarities which benefit schema matching, that is, the similarity of clauses itself, the similarity of the frequency of clauses occurring in different SQL statements and the similarity of statistics about the relationship among clauses. We combine the clauses related to the similarities into a graph, and then transform the task of matching attributes into the problem of matching the graphs. Through matching the graphs, we obtain a set of attribute sequence pairs with the similarity score. Actually, each sequence pair represents a set of correspondences. Next, we exploit the techniques from the quadratic programming field to decompose the sequence pairs into correspondences, that is, to obtain the similarity score of each correspondence. Finally, an efficient method is used to choose the best correspondence for each attribute from the candidate set. The experimental study shows that the proposed approach is effective and its combination with other matchers has good performance.

Seasonal variation in antidepressant prescriptions, environmental light and web queries for seasonal affective disorder.

The state of an individual's mental health depends on many factors. Determination of the importance of any particular factor within a population needs access to unbiased data. We used publicly available data-sets to investigate, at a population level, how surrogates of mental health covary with light exposure. We found strong seasonal patterns of antidepressant prescriptions, which show stronger correlations with day length than levels of solar energy. Levels of depression in a population can therefore be determined by proxy indicators such as web query logs. Furthermore, these proxies for depression correlate with day length rather than solar energy.Declaration of interestNone.

Improving the effectiveness of keyword search in databases using query logs

Using query logs to enhance user experience has been extensively studied in the Web IR literature. However, in the area of keyword search on structured data (relational databases in particular), most existing works have focused on improving search result quality via designing better scoring functions, without giving explicit consideration to query logs. However, query logs can reflect the user preferences, so our work taps into the wealth of information contained in query logs and aims to enhance the search effectiveness by explicitly taking into account the log information when ranking the query results. Different from existing approaches only relying on a schema graph or a data graph, our work designs a comprehensive solution based on both the schema graph and the data graph for discovering top-k results with two stages. First, we identify top-k candidate networks with a query-log-aware ranking strategy by employing the largest frequent subtrees mined from query logs. Since a candidate network usually corresponds to multiple joined tuple trees, we further rank these joined tuple trees with the PageRank principle based on the data graph in the second stage. Finally, user studies on a real dataset validate the effectiveness of the proposed ranking strategy.

A Comparative Analysis of Web Search Query: Informational Vs. Navigational Queries

The search engines are mainly used to retrieve relevant information. Information retrieval researchers show that queries are the basis for providing better search engine performance. The search query is becoming a means for users to search for their needed information. Web search query is one of the common search queries that is widely used in domain areas. However, the main challenge is the absence of a clear understanding of how web search query influences the users’ behavior on different web search engines. With the emergence of different types of a web search query, the understanding of user behavior on a web search query guides in improving the performance of many web search engines. Current research focused on using informational queries to search relevance information from a database while ignoring the importance of navigational queries. In this paper, we compared the informational and navigational type of a web search query that is mostly used in academic settings. Specifically, we examine the problems, solutions and techniques used in each of these types. We used a query log to conduct an experiment using BM25 mathematical model. The results indicated that the informational search query performed best because several keywords have been included to properly explain the queries. Also, language vocabularies used in informational queries contributed to better search performance. We believed that the outcomes of our comparisons will guide web search engine developers on the right search query for their web search engines.

Modeling concepts and their relationships for corpus-based query auto-completion

AbstractQuery auto-completion helps users to formulate their information needs by providing suggestion lists at every typed key. This task is commonly addressed by exploiting query logs and the approaches proposed in the literature fit well in web scale scenarios, where usually huge amounts of past user queries can be analyzed to provide reliable suggestions. However, when query logs are not available, e.g. in enterprise or desktop search engines, these methods are not applicable at all. To face these challenging scenarios, we present a novel corpus-based approach which exploits the textual content of an indexed document collection in order to dynamically generate query completions. Our method extracts informative text fragments from the corpus and it combines them using a probabilistic graphical model in order to capture the relationships between the extracted concepts. Using this approach, it is possible to automatically complete partial queries with significant suggestions related to the keywords already entered by the user without requiring the analysis of the past queries. We evaluate our system through a user study on two different real-world document collections. The experiments show that our method is able to provide meaningful completions outperforming the state-of-the art approach.

User Information Needs Analysis based on Query Log Big Data of the National Archives of Korea

User Information Needs Analysis based on Query Log Big Data of the National Archives of Korea

Coverage pattern based framework to improve search engine advertising

Sponsored search has emerged as one of the most dominant forms for advertising on the Web. In sponsored search, advertisers create ad campaigns and bid on the keywords of potential search queries related to a given product or service. It has been observed that search queries follow a long-tail distribution of a small yet fat head of frequent queries and a long and thin tail of infrequent queries. Normally, the advertisers tend to bid on frequent keywords related to search queries. As a result, the ad space of the tail portion of search queries is harder to exploit. In this paper, we have proposed an improved allocation approach to utilize the ad space of the tail keywords related to search queries based on the knowledge of coverage patterns extracted from the transactions formed from search query logs. The advertisers bid on potential concepts represented by coverage patterns which consist of a combination of head and tail keywords. By facilitating the advertisers to bid on the concepts, the proposed approach improves the ad space utilization of tail queries. Experiments on the real-world dataset of search query logs demonstrate that the proposed approach indeed improves the performance of search engine advertising by improving ad space utilization of tail queries.

Cascade-aware partitioning of large graph databases

Graph partitioning is an essential task for scalable data management and analysis. The current partitioning methods utilize the structure of the graph, and the query log if available. Some queries performed on the database may trigger further operations. For example, the query workload of a social network application may contain re-sharing operations in the form of cascades. It is beneficial to include the potential cascades in the graph partitioning objectives. In this paper, we introduce the problem of cascade-aware graph partitioning that aims to minimize the overall cost of communication among parts/servers during cascade processes. We develop a randomized solution that estimates the underlying cascades, and use it as an input for partitioning of large-scale graphs. Experiments on 17 real social networks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed solution in terms of the partitioning objectives.

Similarity Metrics for SQL Query Clustering

Database access logs are the starting point for many forms of database administration, from database performance tuning, to security auditing, to benchmark design, and many more. Unfortunately, query logs are also large and unwieldy, and it can be difficult for an analyst to extract broad patterns from the set of queries found therein. Clustering is a natural first step towards understanding the massive query logs. However, many clustering methods rely on the notion of pairwise similarity, which is challenging to compute for SQL queries, especially when the underlying data and database schema is unavailable. We investigate the problem of computing similarity between queries, relying only on the query structure. We conduct a rigorous evaluation of three query similarity heuristics proposed in the literature applied to query clustering on multiple query log datasets, representing different types of query workloads. To improve the accuracy of the three heuristics, we propose a generic feature engineering strategy, using classical query rewrites to standardize query structure. The proposed strategy results in a significant improvement in the performance of all three similarity heuristics.

Characterising dataset search—An analysis of search logs and data requests

Large amounts of data are becoming increasingly available online. In order to benefit from it we need tools to retrieve the most relevant datasets that match ones data needs. Several vocabularies have been developed to describe datasets in order to increase their discoverability, but for data publishers is costly to cumbersome to annotate them using all, leading to the question of what properties are more important. In this work we contribute with a systematic study of the patterns and specific attributes that data consumers use to search for data and how it compares with general web search. We performed a query log analysis based on logs from four national open data portals and conducted a qualitative analysis of user data requests for requests issued to one of them. Search queries issued on data portals differ from those issued to web search engines in their length, topic, and structure. Based on our findings we hypothesise that portals search functionalities are currently used in an exploratory manner, rather than to retrieve a specific resource. In our study of data requests we found that geospatial and temporal attributes, as well as information on the required granularity of the data are the most common features. The findings of both analyses suggest that these features are of higher importance in dataset retrieval in contrast to general web search, suggesting that efforts of dataset publishers should focus on generating dataset descriptions including them.

Handling data-skewness in character based string similarity join using Hadoop

The scalability of similarity joins is threatened by the unexpected data characteristic of data skewness. This is a pervasive problem in scientific data. Due to skewness, the uneven distribution of attributes occurs, and it can cause a severe load imbalance problem. When database join operations are applied to these datasets, skewness occurs exponentially. All the algorithms developed to date for the implementation of database joins are highly skew sensitive. This paper presents a new approach for handling data-skewness in a character-based string similarity join using the MapReduce framework. In the literature, no such work exists to handle data skewness in character-based string similarity join, although work for set based string similarity joins exists. Proposed work has been divided into three stages, and every stage is further divided into mapper and reducer phases, which are dedicated to a specific task. The first stage is dedicated to finding the length of strings from a dataset. For valid candidate pair generation, MR-Pass Join framework has been suggested in the second stage. MRFA concepts are incorporated for string similarity join, which is named as “MRFA-SSJ” (MapReduce Frequency Adaptive – String Similarity Join) in the third stage which is further divided into four MapReduce phases. Hence, MRFA-SSJ has been proposed to handle skewness in the string similarity join. The experiments have been implemented on three different datasets namely: DBLP, Query log and a real dataset of IP addresses & Cookies by deploying Hadoop framework. The proposed algorithm has been compared with three known algorithms and it has been noticed that all these algorithms fail when data is highly skewed, whereas our proposed method handles highly skewed data without any problem. A set-up of the 15-node cluster has been used in this experiment, and we are following the Zipf distribution law for the analysis of skewness factor. Also, a comparison among existing and proposed techniques has been shown. Existing techniques survived till Zipf factor 0.5 whereas the proposed algorithm survives up to Zipf factor 1. Hence the proposed algorithm is skew insensitive and ensures scalability with a reasonable query processing time for string similarity database join. It also ensures the even distribution of attributes.

Automatic prediction of news intent for search queries

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to predict news intent by exploring contextual and temporal features directly mined from a general search engine query log.Design/methodology/approachFirst, a ground-truth data set with correctly marked news and non-news queries was built. Second, a detailed analysis of the search goals and topics distribution of news/non-news queries was conducted. Third, three news features, that is, the relationship between entity and contextual words extended from query sessions, topical similarity among clicked results and temporal burst point were obtained. Finally, to understand the utilities of the new features and prior features, extensive prediction experiments on SogouQ (a Chinese search engine query log) were conducted.FindingsNews intent can be predicted with high accuracy by using the proposed contextual and temporal features, and the macro average F1 of classification is around 0.8677. Contextual features are more effective than temporal features. All the three new features are useful and significant in improving the accuracy of news intent prediction.Originality/valueThis paper provides a new and different perspective in recognizing queries with news intent without use of such large corpora as social media (e.g. Wikipedia, Twitter and blogs) and news data sets. The research will be helpful for general-purpose search engines to address search intents for news events. In addition, the authors believe that the approaches described here in this paper are general enough to apply to other verticals with dynamic content and interest, such as blog or financial data.

Query log compression for workload analytics

Analyzing database access logs is a key part of performance tuning, intrusion detection, benchmark development, and many other database administration tasks. Unfortunately, it is common for production databases to deal with millions or more queries each day, so these logs must be summarized before they can be used. Designing an appropriate summary encoding requires trading off between conciseness and information content. For example: simple workload sampling may miss rare, but high impact queries. In this paper, we present L OG R, a lossy log compression scheme suitable for use in many automated log analytics tools, as well as for human inspection. We formalize and analyze the space/fidelity trade-off in the context of a broader family of "pattern" and "pattern mixture" log encodings to which L OG R belongs. We show through a series of experiments that L OG R compressed encodings can be created efficiently, come with provable information-theoretic bounds on their accuracy, and outperform state-of-art log summarization strategies.