On the Study of Transformers for Query Suggestion

When conducting a search task, users may find it difficult to articulate their need, even more so when the task is complex. To help them complete their search, search engine usually provide query suggestions. A good query suggestion system requires to model user behavior during the search session. In this article, we study multiple Transformer architectures applied to the query suggestion task and compare them with recurrent neural network (RNN)-based models. We experiment Transformer models with different tokenizers, with different Encoders (large pretrained models or fully trained ones), and with two kinds of architectures (flat or hierarchic). We study the performance and the behaviors of these various models, and observe that Transformer-based models outperform RNN-based ones. We show that while the hierarchical architectures exhibit very good performances for query suggestion, the flat models are more suitable for complex and long search tasks. Finally, we investigate the flat models behavior and demonstrate that they indeed learn to recover the hierarchy of a search session.

Time-aware query suggestion diversification for temporally ambiguous queries

Purpose The purpose of this study is to generate diversified results for temporally ambiguous queries and the candidate queries are ensured to have a high coverage of subtopics, which are derived from different temporal periods. Design/methodology/approach Two novel time-aware query suggestion diversification models are developed by integrating semantics and temporality information involved in queries into two state-of-the-art explicit diversification algorithms (i.e. IA-select and xQuaD), respectively, and then specifying the components on which these two models rely on. Most importantly, first explored is how to explicitly determine query subtopics for each unique query from the query log or clicked documents and then modeling the subtopics into query suggestion diversification. The discussion on how to mine temporal intent behind a query from query log is also followed. Finally, to verify the effectiveness of the proposal, experiments on a real-world query log are conducted. Findings Preliminary experiments demonstrate that the proposed method can significantly outperform the existing state-of-the-art methods in terms of producing the candidate query suggestion for temporally ambiguous queries. Originality/value This study reports the first attempt to generate query suggestions indicating diverse interested time points to the temporally ambiguous (input) queries. The research will be useful in enhancing users’ search experience through helping them to formulate accurate queries for their search tasks. In addition, the approaches investigated in the paper are general enough to be used in many domains; that is, experimental information retrieval systems, Web search engines, document archives and digital libraries.

CASE: Context-Aware Semantic Expansion

In this paper, we define and study a new task called Context-Aware Semantic Expansion (CASE). Given a seed term in a sentential context, we aim to suggest other terms that well fit the context as the seed. CASE has many interesting applications such as query suggestion, computer-assisted writing, and word sense disambiguation, to name a few. Previous explorations, if any, only involve some similar tasks, and all require human annotations for evaluation. In this study, we demonstrate that annotations for this task can be harvested at scale from existing corpora, in a fully automatic manner. On a dataset of 1.8 million sentences thus derived, we propose a network architecture that encodes the context and seed term separately before suggesting alternative terms. The context encoder in this architecture can be easily extended by incorporating seed-aware attention. Our experiments demonstrate that competitive results are achieved with appropriate choices of context encoder and attention scoring function.

Query Suggestion on Drugs e-Dictionary Using the Levenshtein Distance Algorithm

Dictionary of medicine in the form of a thick book has many disadvantages, one of which is impractical. This is the reason for Indonesian developers to create drugs e-Dictionary. But the drugs e-Dictionary that has been developed is still in the form of a letter index so that users must search the terms one by one in sequential order. This has become so inefficient and ineffective that it is necessary to add a search function and query suggestion feature to the drug e-dictionary. The purpose of this study is to build a query suggestion facility on drugs e-Dictionary using the Levenshtein Distance algorithm. The stages of this research consist of the Development of web-based drugs e-Dictionary, Implementation of the Levenshtein Distance Algorithm, Query Suggestion Testing, and Usage. Based on the results of the implementation of the Levenshtein Distance algorithm and test results, Drugs e-Dictionary can evaluate words that are not in the database. The query suggestion function works by producing the closest word output contained in the database.