An analysis of free-text queries for a multi-field web form

We report how users interact with an experimental system that transforms single-field textual input into a multi-field query for an existing travel planner system. The experimental system was made publicly available and we collected over 30,000 queries from almost 12,000 users. From the free-text query log, we examined how users formulated structured information needs into free-text queries. The query log analysis shows that there is great variety in query formulation, over 400 query templates were found that occurred at least 4 times. Furthermore, with over 100 respondents to our questionnaire, we provide both quantitative and qualitative evidence indicating that end-users significantly prefer a single field interface over a multi-field interface when performing structured search.

[1]  Matthias Hagen,et al.  Query segmentation revisited , 2011, WWW.

[2]  Farooq Ahmad,et al.  Learning a Spelling Error Model from Search Query Logs , 2005, HLT.

[3]  J. B. Brooke,et al.  SUS: A 'Quick and Dirty' Usability Scale , 1996 .

[4]  ChengXiang Zhai,et al.  Unsupervised query segmentation using clickthrough for information retrieval , 2011, SIGIR '11.

[5]  Daniel Gayo-Avello,et al.  A survey on session detection methods in query logs and a proposal for future evaluation , 2009, Inf. Sci..

[6]  Monika Henzinger,et al.  Analysis of a very large web search engine query log , 1999, SIGF.

[7]  Amanda Spink,et al.  Searching the Web: the public and their queries , 2001 .

[8]  Mitesh Patel,et al.  Structured databases on the web: observations and implications , 2004, SGMD.

[9]  Harry R. Tennant,et al.  Talk to Your Semantic Web , 2005, IEEE Internet Comput..

[10]  W. Bruce Croft,et al.  Analysis of long queries in a large scale search log , 2009, WSCD '09.

[11]  W. Bruce Croft,et al.  Ranking using multiple document types in desktop search , 2010, SIGIR '10.

[12]  Jamie Callan,et al.  DISTRIBUTED INFORMATION RETRIEVAL , 2002 .

[13]  Kevin Chen-Chuan Chang,et al.  Towards rich query interpretation: walking back and forth for mining query templates , 2010, WWW '10.

[14]  Djoerd Hiemstra,et al.  Free-Text Search over Complex Web Forms , 2011, IRFC.

[15]  Thorsten Joachims,et al.  Optimizing search engines using clickthrough data , 2002, KDD.

[16]  Xiao Li,et al.  Extracting structured information from user queries with semi-supervised conditional random fields , 2009, SIGIR.

[17]  Allan Hanbury,et al.  Multidisciplinary Information Retrieval , 2011, Lecture Notes in Computer Science.

[18]  Bernard J. Jansen,et al.  Search log analysis: What it is, what's been done, how to do it , 2006 .