Exploring Session Context using Distributed Representations of Queries and Reformulations

Search logs contain examples of frequently occurring patterns of user reformulations of queries. Intuitively, the reformulation “san francisco” → “san francisco 49ers” is semantically similar to “detroit” →”detroit lions”. Likewise, “london”→”things to do in london” and “new york”→”new york tourist attractions” can also be considered similar transitions in intent. The reformulation “movies” → “new movies” and “york” → “new york”, however, are clearly different despite the lexical similarities in the two reformulations.

In this paper, we study the distributed representation of queries learnt by deep neural network models, such as the Convolutional Latent Semantic Model, and show that they can be used to represent query reformulations as vectors. These reformulation vectors exhibit favourable properties such as mapping semantically and syntactically similar query changes closer in the embedding space. Our work is motivated by the success of continuous space language models in capturing relationships between words and their meanings using offset vectors. We demonstrate a way to extend the same intuition to represent query reformulations.

Furthermore, we show that the distributed representations of queries and reformulations are both useful for modelling session context for query prediction tasks, such as for query auto-completion (QAC) ranking. Our empirical study demonstrates that short-term (session) history context features based on these two representations improves the mean reciprocal rank (MRR) for the QAC ranking task by more than 10% over a supervised ranker baseline. Our results also show that by using features based on both these representations together we achieve a better performance, than either of them individually.