Jigs and Lures: Associating Web Queries with Structured Entities

Patrick Pantel and Ariel Fuxman
Microsoft Research


Abstract

We propose methods for estimating the probability that an entity from an entity database is associated with a web search query. Association is modeled using a query entity click graph, blending general query click logs with vertical query click logs. Smoothing techniques are proposed to address the inherent data sparsity in such graphs, including interpolation using a query synonymy model. A large-scale empirical analysis of the smoothing techniques, over a 2-year click graph collected from a commercial search engine, shows significant reductions in modeling error. The association models are then applied to the task of recommending products to web queries, by annotating queries with products from a large catalog and then mining query-product associations through web search session analysis. Experimental analysis shows that our smoothing techniques improve coverage while keeping precision stable, and overall, that our top-performing model affects 9% of general web queries with 94% precision.




Full paper: http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/P/P11/P11-1009.pdf