Time-Dependent Semantic Similarity Measure of Queries Using Historical Click-Through Data

• Qiankun Zhao, School of Computer Engineering Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
• Steven C. H. Hoi, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, China
• Tie-Yan Liu, Web Search and Mining Microsoft Research Asia, China
• Sourav S Bhowmick, School of Computer Engineering Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
• Michael R. Lyu, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
• Wei-Ying Ma, Microsoft Research Asia, China

Full text:

Track: Data Mining

Slot: 11:00-12:30, Friday 26th May

It has become a promising direction to measure similarity of Web search queries by mining the increasing amount of clickthrough data logged by Web search engines, which record the interactions between users and the search engines. Most existing approaches employ the click-through data for similarity measure of queries with little consideration of the temporal factor, while the click-through data is often dynamic and contains rich temporal information. In this paper we present a new framework of time-dependent query semantic similarity model on exploiting the temporal characteristics of historical click-through data. The intuition is that more accurate semantic similarity values between queries can be obtained by taking into account the timestamps of the log data. With a set of user-defined calendar schema and calendar patterns, our time-dependent query similarity model is constructed using the marginalized kernel technique, which can exploit both explicit similarity and implicit semantics from the click-through data effectively. Experimental results on a large set of click-through data acquired from a commercial search engine show that our time-dependent query similarity model is more accurate than the existing approaches. Moreover, we observe that our time-dependent query similarity model can, to some extent, reflect real-world semantics such as real-world events that are happening over time.

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