Characterizing web content, user interests, and search behavior by reading level and topic

Abstract

A user's expertise or ability to understand a document on a given topic is an important aspect of that document's relevance. However, this aspect has not been well-explored in information retrieval systems, especially those at Web scale where the great diversity of content, users, and tasks presents an especially challenging search problem. To help improve our modeling and understanding of this diversity, we apply automatic text classifiers, based on reading difficulty and topic prediction, to estimate a novel type of profile for important entities in Web search -- users, websites, and queries. These profiles capture topic and reading level distributions, which we then use in conjunction with search log data to characterize and compare different entities.