Towards optimum query segmentation
Matthias Hagen, Martin Potthast, Anna Cornelia Beyer, Benno Stein · 2012
Query segmentation is the problem of identifying those keywords in a query, which together form compound concepts or phrases like "new york times". Such segments can help a search engine to better interpret a user's intents and to tailor the search results more appropriately. Our contributions to this problem are threefold. (1) We conduct the first large-scale study of human segmentation behavior based on more than 500000 segmentations. (2) We show that the traditionally applied segmentation accuracy measures are not appropriate for such large-scale corpora and introduce new, more robust measures. (3) We develop a new query segmentation approach with the basic idea that, in cases of doubt, it is often better to (partially) leave queries without any segmentation.