User Satisfaction Prediction with Mouse Movement Information in Heterogeneous Search Environment

Satisfaction prediction is one of the prime concerns in search performance evaluation. It is a non-trivial task for three major reasons: (1) The definition of satisfaction is subjective and different users may have different opinions in the process of satisfaction judgment. (2) Most existing studies on satisfaction prediction mainly rely on users’ click-through or query reformulation behaviors but there are many sessions without such interactions. (3) Most existing works primarily rely on the hypothesis that all results on search result pages (SERPs) are homogeneous, but a variety of heterogeneous search results have been aggregated into SERPs to improve the diversity and quality of search results recently. To shed light on these research questions, we construct an experimental search engine that could collect users’ satisfaction feedback as well as mouse click-through/movement data. Inspired by recent studies in predicting search result relevance based on mouse movement patterns (namely, motifs), we propose to estimate search satisfaction with motifs extracted from mouse movement data on SERPs. Besides the existing frequency-based motif selection method, two novel selection strategies (distance-based and distribution-based) are also adopted to extract high-quality motifs for satisfaction prediction. Experimental results show that the proposed strategies outperform existing methods and have promising generalization capability for unseen users and queries in both a homogeneous and heterogeneous search environment.