Relevant term suggestion in interactive web search based on contextual information in query session logs

Abstract This paper proposes an effective term suggestion approach to interactive Web search. Conventional approaches to making term suggestions involve extracting co‐occurring keyterms from highly ranked retrieved documents. Such approaches must deal with term extraction difficulties and interference from irrelevant documents, and, more importantly, have difficulty extracting terms that are conceptually related but do not frequently co‐occur in documents. In this paper, we present a new, effective log‐based approach to relevant term extraction and term suggestion. Using this approach, the relevant terms suggested for a user query are those that co‐occur in similar query sessions from search engine logs, rather than in the retrieved documents. In addition, the suggested terms in each interactive search step can be organized according to its relevance to the entire query session, rather than to the most recent single query as in conventional approaches. The proposed approach was tested using a proxy server log containing about two million query transactions submitted to search engines in Taiwan. The obtained experimental results show that the proposed approach can provide organized and highly relevant terms, and can exploit the contextual information in a user's query session to make more effective suggestions.