Modeling users' search sessions for high utility query recommendation.

Query recommendation has long been considered a key feature of search engines, which can improve users' search experience by providing useful query suggestions for their search tasks. Most existing approaches on query recommendation aim to recommend relevant queries, i.e., alternative queries similar to a user's initial query. However, the ultimate goal of query recommendation is to assist users to reformulate queries so that they can accomplish their search task successfully and quickly. Only considering relevance in query recommendation is apparently not directly toward this goal. In this paper, we argue that it is more important to directly recommend queries with high utility, i.e., queries that can better satisfy users' information needs. For this purpose, we attempt to infer query utility from users' sequential search behaviors recorded in their search sessions. Specifically, we propose a dynamic Bayesian network, referred as Query Utility Model (QUM), to capture query utility by simultaneously modeling users' reformulation and click behaviors. We then recommend queries with high utility to help users better accomplish their search tasks. We empirically evaluated the performance of our approach on a publicly released query log by comparing with the state-of-the-art methods. The experimental results show that, by recommending high utility queries, our approach is far more effective in helping users find relevant search results and thus satisfying their information needs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]