Is the First Query the Most Important: An Evaluation of Query Aggregation Schemes in Session Search

Web users often issue a series of related queries, which form a search session, to fulfill complicated information needs. Query aggregation utilizes and combines multiple queries for session search. Prior research has demonstrated that query aggregation is an effective technique for session search. Consequently, how to effectively weight queries in a session becomes an interesting problem. This paper evaluates various query aggregation schemes and proposes a new three-step query aggregation method. Evaluation on TREC 2011 and 2012 Session tracks shows that the proposed scheme works very well and significantly outperforms the best TREC systems.

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