Abstraction of query auto completion logs for anonymity-preserving analysis

TIPS: Time-aware Personalised Semantic-based query auto-completion

With the rapid growth of the Internet, search engines play vital roles in meeting the users’ information needs. However, formulating information needs to simple queries for canonical users is a problem yet. Therefore, query auto-completion, which is one of the most important characteristics of the search engines, is leveraged to provide a ranked list of queries matching the user’s entered prefix. Although query auto-completion utilises useful information provided by search engine logs, time-, semantic- and context-aware features are still important resources of extra knowledge. Specifically, in this study, a hybrid query auto-completion system called TIPS ( Time-aware Personalised Semantic-based query auto-completion) is introduced to combine the well-known systems performing based on popularity and neural language model. Furthermore, this system is supplemented by time-aware features that blend both context and semantic information in a collaborative manner. Experimental studies on the standard AOL dataset are conducted to compare our proposed system with state-of-the-art methods, that is, FactorCell, ConcatCell and Unadapted. The results illustrate the significant superiorities of TIPS in terms of mean reciprocal rank (MRR), especially for short-length prefixes.

Generation of Synthetic Query Auto Completion Logs

Privacy concerns can prohibit research access to large-scale commercial query logs. Here we focus on generation of a synthetic log from a publicly available dataset, suitable for evaluation of query auto completion (QAC) systems. The synthetic log contains plausible string sequences reflecting how users enter their queries in a QAC interface. Properties that would influence experimental outcomes are compared between a synthetic log and a real QAC log through a set of side-by-side experiments, and confirm the applicability of the generated log for benchmarking the performance of QAC methods.