Applying Diversity Metrics to Improve the Selection of Web Search Term Refinements
Tague Griffith, Jan Pfeifer · 2008
Automatic expansion of user queries during web search is a technique provided by most web search engines. Term ex-pansion helps users to phrase more specific queries, correct misspellings, and acts as an accelerator for frequently used queries. Typically search engines provide five to ten refine-ments. Many of the refinement sets have a high degree of redundancy which suggests that popularity is the primary factor for selecting a refinement. This is particularly evi-dent in terms that have multiple semantic meanings one of which is association with technology. The popularity of the technological usage of the word with dwarf the other us-ages, monopolizing the set of refinements. We explore two approaches to apply a measure of diversity in the selection of refinements: using word sense similarity and web seman-tic similarity. We analyze some of the problems with using diversity as the sole metric for refinement selection and eval-uate the results of our technique through a human editorial test. 1.