The linguistic structure of English web-search queries

Abstract

Web-search queries are known to be short, but little else is known about their structure. In this paper we investigate the applicability of part-of-speech tagging to typical Englishlanguage web search-engine queries and the potential value of these tags for improving search results. We begin by identifying a set of part-of-speech tags suitable for search queries and quantifying their occurrence. We find that proper-nouns constitute 40% of query terms, and proper nouns and nouns together constitute over 70% of query terms. We also show that the majority of queries are nounphrases, not unstructured collections of terms. We then use a set of queries manually labeled with these tags to train a Brill tagger and evaluate its performance. In addition, we investigate classification of search queries into grammatical classes based on the syntax of part-of-speech tag sequences. We also conduct preliminary investigative experiments into the practical applicability of leveraging query-trained part-of-speech taggers for information-retrieval tasks. In particular, we show that part-of-speech information can be a significant feature in machine-learned searchresult relevance. These experiments also include the potential use of the tagger in selecting words for omission or substitution in query reformulation, actions which can improve recall. We conclude that training a partof-speech tagger on labeled corpora of queries significantly outperforms taggers based on traditional corpora, and leveraging the unique linguistic structure of web-search queries can improve search experience.

Managing misspelled queries in IR applications

“…The average length of the resulting queries is 2.75. Such a short length corresponds to that of web search queries: 2-3 terms on average in most studies Bendersky and Croft, 2009;Arampatzis and Kamps, 2008;Barr et al, 2008;Jansen et al, 2000;Kirsch, 1998). Moreover, title fields consist mainly of noun phrases, as in our sample, which also agrees with the nature of web queries, noun phrases in the main (Barr et al, 2008;Kirsch, 1998).…”

Interpreting keyword queries over web knowledge bases

“…Research has shown that part-of-speech (POS) tagging can be accurately performed over keyword queries [2]. Our approach to annotating queries exploits query terms, their POS tags, and sequential relationships between terms and tags to concurrently infer a segmentation and semantic annotation of a part-of-speech annotated keyword query.…”

Improving Search Query Matching for Electronic TV Program Guide Data Extraction

“…An existing research shows that nouns "constitute over 70% of query terms" 1 [6]. Moreover, nouns used together with adjectives are "common need information clusters" in English queries for multiple search engines [7].…”