Processing Queries in Session in a Quantum-Inspired IR Framework

In a search session, users tend to reformulate their queries, for instance because they want to generalise or specify them, or because they are undergoing a drift in their information need. This motivates to regard queries not in isolation, but within the session they are embedded in. In this poster, we propose an approach inspired by quantum mechanics to represent queries and their reformulations as density operators. Differently constructed densities can potentially be applied for different types of query reformulation. To do so, we propose and discuss indicators that can hint us to the type of query reformulation we are dealing with.