Intent-aware query similarity

Abstract

Query similarity calculation is an important problem and has a wide range of applications in IR, including query recommendation, query expansion, and even advertisement matching. Existing work on query similarity aims to provide a single similarity measure without considering the fact that queries are ambiguous and usually have multiple search intents. In this paper, we argue that query similarity should be defined upon search intents, so-called intent-aware query similarity. By introducing search intents into the calculation of query similarity, we can obtain more accurate and also informative similarity measures on queries and thus help a variety of applications, especially those related to diversification. Specifically, we first identify the potential search intents of queries, and then measure query similarity under different intents using intent-aware representations. A regularized topic model is employed to automatically learn the potential intents of queries by using both the words from search result snippets and the regularization from query co-clicks. Experimental results confirm the effectiveness of intent-aware query similarity on ambiguous queries which can provide significantly better similarity scores over the traditional approaches. We also experimentally verified the utility of intent-aware similarity in the application of query recommendation, which can suggest diverse queries in a structured way to search users.