On using user query sequence to detect off-topic search
Alana J. Platt, Nazli Goharian, Saket S. R. Mengle · 2007
Retrieving off-topic documents to a user's pre-defined area of interest via a search engine is potentially a violation of access rights and is a concern to every private, commercial, and governmental organization. We improve content-based off-topic search detection approaches by using a sequence of user queries versus the individual queries. In this approach, we reevaluate how off-topic a query is, based on the sequence of queries that preceded it. Our empirical results show that using the information from the queries in a given query window, the false alarm rate is reduced by a statistically significant amount.