A Synthetic Search Session Generator for Task-Aware Information Seeking and Retrieval

Abstract

For users working on a complex search task, it is common to address different goals at various stages of the task through query iterations. While addressing these goals, users go through different task states as well. Understanding these task states latent under users' interactions is crucial in identifying users' changing intents and search behaviors to simulate and achieve real-time adaptive search recommendations and retrievals. However, the availability of sizeable real-world web search logs is scarce due to various ethical and privacy concerns, thus often challenging to develop generalizable task-aware computation models. Furthermore, session logs with task state labels are rarer. For many researchers who lack the resources to directly and at scale collect data from users and conduct a time-consuming data annotation process, this becomes a considerable bottleneck to furthering their research. Synthetic search sessions have the potential to address this gap. This paper shares a parsimonious model to simulate synthetic web search sessions with task state information, which interactive information retrieval (IIR) and search personalization studies could utilize to develop and evaluate task-based search and retrieval systems.