doi:10.3850/978-981-08-7300-4_1073

ABSTRACT

The widespread adoption of the World-Wide Web (the Web) has created challenges both for society as a whole and for the technology used to build and maintain the Web. The ongoing struggle of information retrieval systems is to wade through this vast pile of data and satisfy users by presenting them with information that most adequately its their needs. On a societal level, the Web is expanding faster than we can comprehend its implications or develop rules for its use. The ubiquitous use of the Web has raised important social concerns in the areas of privacy, censorship, and access to information. On a technical level, the novelty of the Web and the pace of its growth have created challenges not only in the development of new applications that realize the power of the Web, but also in the technology needed to scale applications to accommodate the resulting large data sets and heavy loads. This thesis presents algorithms and techniques for increasing a search service's understanding of web queries. Existing search services rely solely on a query's occurrence in the document collection to locate relevant documents. They typically do not perform any task or topic-based analysis of queries using other available resources, and do not leverage changes in user query patterns over time. Provided within are a set of techniques and metrics for performing temporal analysis on query logs. The metrics proposed for our log analysis are shown to be reasonable and informative, and can be used to detect changing trends and patterns in the query stream, thus providing valuable data to a search service.

Keywords: Knowledge discovery, Automatic classification, Concept search, Concept relationships.

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