More than relevance: high utility query recommendation by mining users' search behaviors

Query recommendation plays a critical role in helping users' search. Most existing approaches on query recommendation aim to recommend relevant queries. However, the ultimate goal of query recommendation is to assist users to reformulate queries so that they can accomplish their search task successfully and quickly. Only considering relevance in query recommendation is apparently not directly toward this goal. In this paper, we argue that it is more important to directly recommend queries with high utility, i.e., queries that can better satisfy users' information needs. For this purpose, we propose a novel generative model, referred to as Query Utility Model (QUM), to capture query utility by simultaneously modeling users' reformulation and click behaviors. The experimental results on a publicly released query log show that, our approach is more effective in helping users find relevant search results and thus satisfying their information needs.