A Term-Based Methodology for Query Reformulation Understanding
This work addresses the challenge of interpreting user behavior in session search for researchers and practitioners, but it is incremental as it builds on existing query analysis techniques.
The paper tackled the problem of understanding how users reformulate queries during search sessions by analyzing term retention, removal, and addition, and demonstrated that their term-based methodology provides valuable insights into query reformulation strategies using TREC Session Track data.
Key to any research involving session search is the understanding of how a user's queries evolve throughout the session. When a user creates a query reformulation, he or she is consciously retaining terms from their original query, removing others and adding new terms. By measuring the similarity between queries we can make inferences on the user's information need and how successful their new query is likely to be. By identifying the origins of added terms we can infer the user's motivations and gain an understanding of their interactions. In this paper we present a novel term-based methodology for understanding and interpreting query reformulation actions. We use TREC Session Track data to demonstrate how our technique is able to learn from query logs and we make use of click data to test user interaction behavior when reformulating queries. We identify and evaluate a range of term-based query reformulation strategies and show that our methods provide valuable insight into understanding query reformulation in session search.