Toward Multi-level Query Understanding – From Query String to Query Semantics
10Search technologies have significantly transformed the way people seek information and acquire knowledge from the internet. To further improve the search accuracy and usability of the current-generation search engines, one of the most important research challenges is to understand a user's intent or information need underlying the query. However, understanding a query in the form of plain text is a non-trivial task. In this talk I will first introduce a framework in which a query is interpreted and represented in multiple levels. Then I will briefly overview our efforts on addressing key research questions from query string, query syntactic, to query semantic understanding. In the rest of the talk I will present our recent work on dynamic query understanding in the query auto-completion process, in which we aim at predicting query representation given only a short prefix.