In the rapidly evolving landscape of information retrieval, search engines strive to provide more personalized and relevant results to users. Query suggestion systems play a crucial role in achieving this goal by assisting users in formulating effective queries. However, existing query suggestion systems mainly rely on textual inputs, potentially limiting user search experiences for querying images. In this paper, we introduce a novel Multimodal Query Suggestion (MMQS) task, which aims to generate query suggestions based on user query images to improve the intentionality and diversity of search results. We present the RL4Sugg framework, leveraging the power of Large Language Models (LLMs) with Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback to optimize the generation process. Through comprehensive experiments, we validate the effectiveness of RL4Sugg, demonstrating a 18% improvement compared to the best existing approach. Moreover, the MMQS has been transferred into real-world search engine products, which yield enhanced user engagement. Our research advances query suggestion systems and provides a new perspective on multimodal information retrieval.
Typically, search engines provide query suggestions to assist users in the search process. Query suggestions are very important for improving users search experience. However, most query suggestions are based on the user's search logs, and they can be influenced by infrequently searched queries. Depending on the user's query, query suggestions can be ineffective in global search engines but effective in a domestic search engine. Conversely, it can be effective in global engines and weak in domestic engines. In addition, log-based query suggestions require many search logs, which makes them dif…
Recent research has shown the usefulness of using collective user interaction data (e.g., query logs) to recommend query modification suggestions for Intranet search. However, most of the query suggestion approaches for Intranet search follow an "one size fits all" strategy, whereby different users who submit an identical query would get the same query suggestion list. This is problematic, as even with the same query, different users may have different topics of interest, which may change over time in response to the user's interaction with the system. We address the problem by proposing a per…
Creating alternative queries, also known as query suggestion, has been proved to be helpful on improving users' search experience. Owing to the suggestions, users could retrieve their information need more quickly and accurately. In many scenarios, these suggestions could be generated from the click-through logs by establishing a bipartite graph of the clicked query-document pairs. Most of the existing methods focused on click-existing queries which possess clicked information in the search logs, to suggest related queries using the co-clicked documents. In this paper, we propose a simple yet …
The query suggestion or auto-completion mechanisms help users to type less while interacting with a search engine. A basic approach that ranks suggestions according to their frequency in the query logs is suboptimal. Firstly, many candidate queries with the same prefix can be removed as redundant. Secondly, the suggestions can also be personalised based on the user's context. These two directions to improve the aforementioned mechanisms' quality can be in opposition: while the latter aims to promote suggestions that address search intents that a user is likely to have, the former aims to diver…
Query suggestions help users of a search engine to refine their queries. Previous work on query suggestion has mainly focused on incorporating directly observable features such as query co-occurrence and semantic similarity. The structure of such features is often set manually, as a result of which hidden dependencies between queries and users may be ignored. We propose an AHNQS model that combines a hierarchical structure with a session-level neural network and a user-level neural network to model the short- and long-term search history of a user. An attention mechanism is used to capture use…
Query suggestion refers to the task of suggesting relevant and related queries to a search engine user to help in query formulation process and to expedite information retrieval with minimum amount of effort. It is highly useful in situations where the search requirements are not well understood and hence it has been widely adopted by search engines to guide users' search activity. For news websites, user queries have a time sensitive nature inherent in them. When some new event happens, there is a sudden burst in queries related to that event and such queries are sustained over a period of ti…
We present a context-aware neural ranking model to exploit users' on-task search activities and enhance retrieval performance. In particular, a two-level hierarchical recurrent neural network is introduced to learn search context representation of individual queries, search tasks, and corresponding dependency structure by jointly optimizing two companion retrieval tasks: document ranking and query suggestion. To identify the variable dependency structure between search context and users' ongoing search activities, attention at both levels of recurrent states are introduced. Extensive experimen…
From the Publisher:Software is a commodity being sold across diverse language and cultural groups, whether in the commercial marketplace, or as customized applications. Developers must structure their applications so that they can be readily and cheaply localized for sale in this range of markets. Obvious differences such as scripts and languages must be understood as well as a range of more subtle cultural conventions. Further topics covered include: the overall architecture for internationalized products and an outline of an internationalization API; the use of computational linguistics meth…
Entity suggestion by example (ESbE) refers to a type of entity acquisition query in which a user provides a set of example entities as the query and obtains in return some entities that best complete the concept underlying the given query. Such entity acquisition queries can be useful in many applications such as related-entity recommendation and query expansion. A number of ESbE query processing solutions exist in the literature. However, they mostly build only on the idea of entity co-occurrences either in text or web lists, without taking advantage of the existence of many web-scale concept…
Related or ideal follow-up suggestions to a web query in search engines are often optimized based on several different parameters -- relevance to the original query, diversity, click probability etc. One or many rankers may be trained to score each suggestion from a candidate pool based on these factors. These scorers are usually pairwise classification tasks where each training example consists of a user query and a single suggestion from the list of candidates. We propose an architecture that takes all candidate suggestions associated with a given query and outputs a suggestion block. We dis…
We address the problem of generating query suggestions to support users in completing their underlying tasks (which motivated them to search in the first place). Given an initial query, these query suggestions should provide a coverage of possible subtasks the user might be looking for. We propose a probabilistic modeling framework that obtains keyphrases from multiple sources and generates query suggestions from these keyphrases. Using the test suites of the TREC Tasks track, we evaluate and analyze each component of our model.
Users may strive to formulate an adequate textual query for their information need. Search engines assist the users by presenting query suggestions. To preserve the original search intent, suggestions should be context-aware and account for the previous queries issued by the user. Achieving context awareness is challenging due to data sparsity. We present a probabilistic suggestion model that is able to account for sequences of previous queries of arbitrary lengths. Our novel hierarchical recurrent encoder-decoder architecture allows the model to be sensitive to the order of queries in the con…
Survey-based studies suggest that search engines are trusted more than social media or even traditional news, although cases of false information or defamation are known. In this study, we analyze query suggestion features of three search engines to see if these features introduce some bias into the query and search process that might compromise this trust. We test our approach on person-related search suggestions by querying the names of politicians from the German Bundestag before the German federal election of 2017. This study introduces a framework to systematically examine and automatical…
Wuhan University（武汉大学）；University of Stavanger（斯塔万格大学）
We address the task of generating query suggestions for task-based search. The current state of the art relies heavily on suggestions provided by a major search engine. In this paper, we solve the task without reliance on search engines. Specifically, we focus on the first step of a two-stage pipeline approach, which is dedicated to the generation of query suggestion candidates. We present three methods for generating candidate suggestions and apply them on multiple information sources. Using a purpose-built test collection, we find that these methods are able to generate high-quality suggesti…
Linknovate Science（Linknovate科学公司）；University of A Coruña（拉科鲁尼亚大学）
Nowadays, search engine users commonly rely on query suggestions to improve their initial inputs. Current systems are very good at recommending lexical adaptations or spelling corrections to users' queries. However, they often struggle to suggest semantically related keywords given a user's query. The construction of a detailed query is crucial in some tasks, such as legal retrieval or academic search. In these scenarios, keyword suggestion methods are critical to guide the user during the query formulation. This paper proposes two novel models for the keyword suggestion task trained on scient…
"High Quality Related Search Query Suggestions" task aims at recommending search queries which are real, accurate, diverse, relevant and engaging. Obtaining large amounts of query-quality human annotations is expensive. Prior work on supervised query suggestion models suffered from selection and exposure bias, and relied on sparse and noisy immediate user-feedback (e.g., clicks), leading to low quality suggestions. Reinforcement Learning techniques employed to reformulate a query using terms from search results, have limited scalability to large-scale industry applications. To recommend high q…
Boolean query construction is often critical for medical systematic review literature search. To create an effective Boolean query, systematic review researchers typically spend weeks coming up with effective query terms and combinations. One challenge to creating an effective systematic review Boolean query is the selection of effective MeSH Terms to include in the query. In our previous work, we created neural MeSH term suggestion methods and compared them to state-of-the-art MeSH term suggestion methods. We found neural MeSH term suggestion methods to be highly effective. In this demonstrat…
This short paper deals with the combination and comparison of two data sources: Search engine results and query suggestions for 16 terms related to political candidates and parties. The data was collected before the federal election in Germany in September 2017 for a period of two months. The rank biased overlap (RBO) statistic is used to measure the similarity of the top-weighted rankings. For each search term and for both the search results and query auto-completions we study the stability of the rankings over time.
University of Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹大学）；Google Research（谷歌研究院）
Users try to articulate their complex information needs during search sessions by reformulating their queries. To make this process more effective, search engines provide related queries to help users in specifying the information need in their search process. In this paper, we propose a customized sequence-to-sequence model for session-based query suggestion. In our model, we employ a query-aware attention mechanism to capture the structure of the session context. is enables us to control the scope of the session from which we infer the suggested next query, which helps not only handle the no…
Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）；Amazon Search（亚马逊搜索）；Amazon Music（亚马逊音乐）；UT Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）
Conventional methods for query autocompletion aim to predict which completed query a user will select from a list. A shortcoming of this approach is that users often do not know which query will provide the best retrieval performance on the current information retrieval system, meaning that any query autocompletion methods trained to mimic user behavior can lead to suboptimal query suggestions. To overcome this limitation, we propose a new approach that explicitly optimizes the query suggestions for downstream retrieval performance. We formulate this as a problem of ranking a set of rankings, …
Term suggestion or recommendation modules can help users to formulate their queries by mapping their personal vocabularies onto the specialized vocabulary of a digital library. While we examined actual user queries of the social sciences digital library Sowiport we could see that nearly one third of the users were explicitly looking for author names rather than terms. Common term recommenders neglect this fact. By picking up the idea of polyrepresentation we could show that in a standardized IR evaluation setting we can significantly increase the retrieval performances by adding topical-relate…
We present the architecture behind Twitter's real-time related query suggestion and spelling correction service. Although these tasks have received much attention in the web search literature, the Twitter context introduces a real-time "twist": after significant breaking news events, we aim to provide relevant results within minutes. This paper provides a case study illustrating the challenges of real-time data processing in the era of "big data". We tell the story of how our system was built twice: our first implementation was built on a typical Hadoop-based analytics stack, but was later rep…
The University of Queensland（昆士兰大学）；CSIRO（联邦科学与工业研究组织）
High-quality medical systematic reviews require comprehensive literature searches to ensure the recommendations and outcomes are sufficiently reliable. Indeed, searching for relevant medical literature is a key phase in constructing systematic reviews and often involves domain (medical researchers) and search (information specialists) experts in developing the search queries. Queries in this context are highly complex, based on Boolean logic, include free-text terms and index terms from standardised terminologies (e.g., the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) thesaurus), and are difficult and time…
Assisting users by suggesting completed queries as they type is a common feature of search systems known as query auto-completion. A query auto-completion engine may use prior signals and available information (e.g., user is anonymous, user has a history, user visited the site before the search or not, etc.) in order to improve its recommendations. There are many possible strategies for query auto-completion and a challenge is to design one optimal engine that considers and uses all available information. When different strategies are used to produce the suggestions, it becomes hard to rank th…
Interactive query expansion can assist users during their query formulation process. We conducted a user study with over 4,000 unique visitors and four different design approaches for a search term suggestion service. As a basis for our evaluation we have implemented services which use three different vocabularies: (1) user search terms, (2) terms from a terminology service and (3) thesaurus terms. Additionally, we have created a new combined service which utilizes thesaurus term and terms from a domain-specific search term re-commender. Our results show that the thesaurus-based method clearly…
Faceted Search Systems (FSS) have become one of the main search interfaces used in vertical search systems, offering users meaningful facets to refine their search query and narrow down the results quickly to find the intended search target. This work focuses on the problem of ranking type-based facets. In a structured information space, type-based facets (t-facets) indicate the category to which each object belongs. When they belong to a large multi-level taxonomy, it is desirable to rank them separately before ranking other facet groups. This helps the searcher in filtering the results accor…
Exploratory information search can challenge users in the formulation of efficacious search queries. Moreover, complex information spaces, such as those managed by Geographical Information Systems, can disorient people, making it difficult to find relevant data. In order to address these issues, we developed a session-based suggestion model that proposes concepts as a "you might also be interested in" function, by taking the user's previous queries into account. Our model can be applied to incrementally generate suggestions in interactive search. It can be used for query expansion, and in gene…
Search query specificity is broadly divided into two categories - Exploratory or Lookup. If a query specificity can be identified at the run time, it can be used to significantly improve the search results as well as quality of suggestions to alter the query. However, with millions of queries coming every day on a commercial search engine, it is non-trivial to develop a horizontal technique to determine query specificity at run time. Existing techniques suffer either from lack of enough training data or are dependent on information such as query length or session information. In this paper, we…
BRIDGE: Multimodal-to-Text Retrieval via Reinforcement-Learned Query Alignment
High institute for computer & information systems（高等计算机与信息系统学院）；Chungbuk National University（忠北大学）；Assiut University（艾斯尤特大学）；University of Innsbruck（因斯布鲁克大学）
Query recommendations in search engines is a double edged sword, with undeniable benefits but potential of harm. Identifying unsafe queries is necessary to protect users from inappropriate query suggestions. However, identifying these is non-trivial because of the linguistic diversity resulting from large vocabularies, social-group-specific slang and typos, and because the inappropriateness of a term depends on the context. Here we formulate the problem as query-set expansion, where we are given a small and potentially biased seed set and the aim is to identify a diverse set of semantically re…
University of Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹大学）；University of Strathclyde（思克莱德大学）；University of Massachusetts Amherst（马萨诸塞大学阿默斯特分校）；Microsoft（微软）
Information seeking conversations between users and Conversational Search Agents (CSAs) consist of multiple turns of interaction. While users initiate a search session, ideally a CSA should sometimes take the lead in the conversation by obtaining feedback from the user by offering query suggestions or asking for query clarifications i.e. mixed initiative. This creates the potential for more engaging conversational searches, but substantially increases the complexity of modelling and evaluating such scenarios due to the large interaction space coupled with the trade-offs between the costs and b…
Autoregressive Retriever: Improving Query Understanding from Item Feedback for Universal Multimodal Retrieval
School of Computer Science and Technology, Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学计算机科学与技术学院）；Zhongguancun Academy（中关村实验室）；Xiaohongshu（小红书）；Southeast Academy of Information Technology, Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学东南信息科学研究院）；Zhongguancun Laboratory（中关村实验室）
We present Broccoli, a fast and easy-to-use search engine for what we call semantic full-text search. Semantic full-text search combines the capabilities of standard full-text search and ontology search. The search operates on four kinds of objects: ordinary words (e.g., edible), classes (e.g., plants), instances (e.g., Broccoli), and relations (e.g., occurs-with or native-to). Queries are trees, where nodes are arbitrary bags of these objects, and arcs are relations. The user interface guides the user in incrementally constructing such trees by instant (search-as-you-type) suggestions of word…
We show how to achieve fast autocompletion for SPARQL queries on very large knowledge bases. At any position in the body of a SPARQL query, the autocompletion suggests matching subjects, predicates, or objects. The suggestions are context-sensitive in the sense that they lead to a non-empty result and are ranked by their relevance to the part of the query already typed. The suggestions can be narrowed down by prefix search on the names and aliases of the desired subject, predicate, or object. All suggestions are themselves obtained via SPARQL queries, which we call autocompletion queries. For …
In this paper we present the IRSA framework that enables the automatic creation of search term suggestion or recommendation systems (TS). Such TS are used to operationalize interactive query expansion and help users in refining their information need in the query formulation phase. Our recent research has shown TS to be more effective when specific to a certain domain. The presented technical framework allows owners of Digital Libraries to create their own specific TS constructed via OAI-harvested metadata with very little effort.
