Query classification and study of university students' search trends

Purpose – This study is an attempt to develop an automatic identification method for Arabic web queries and divide them into several query types using data mining. In addition, it seeks to evaluate the impact of the academic environment on using the internet.Design/methodology/approach – The web log files were collected from one of the higher institute's servers over a one‐month period. A special program was designed and implemented to extract web search queries from these files and also to automatically classify Arabic queries into three query types (i.e. Navigational, Transactional, and Informational queries) based on predefined specifications for each type.Findings – The results indicate that students are slowly and gradually using the internet for more relevant academic purposes. Tests showed that it is possible to automatically classify Arabic queries based on query terms, with 80.6 per cent to 80.2 per cent accuracy for the two phases of the test respectively. In their future strategies, Jordanian u...

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