Exploring web scale language models for search query processing
Jian Long Huang, Jianfeng Gao, Jiangbo Miao, Xiaolong Li, Kuansan Wang, Fritz Behr, Clyde Lee Giles · 2010
It has been widely observed that search queries are composed in a very different style from that of the body or the title of a document. Many techniques explicitly accounting for this language style discrepancy have shown promising results for information retrieval, yet a large scale analysis on the extent of the language differences has been lacking. In this paper, we present an extensive study on this issue by examining the language model properties of search queries and the three text streams associated with each web document: the body, the title, and the anchor text. Our information theoretical analysis shows that queries seem to be composed in a way most similar to how authors summarize documents in anchor texts or titles, offering a quantitative explanation to the observations in past work.