Query Suggestion for Struggling Search by Struggling Flow Graph

Abstract

We propose a method to generate effective query suggestions aiming to help struggling search, where users experience difficulty in locating information that is relevant to their information need in the search session. The core is identifying struggling component of an on-going struggling session and mining the effective representations of it. The struggling component is the semantic component of information need for which the user struggled to find an effective representation during the struggling session. The proposed method identifies the struggling component of given on-going struggling session and mines the sessions containing the identified struggling component from a query log to build a struggling flow graph. The struggling flow graph records users' reformulation behaviors for the terms of the struggling component, through struggling flow graph we can mine effective representations of the struggling component. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the baseline methods when it can use two or more queries in a struggling session.