What Were People Searching For? A Query Log Analysis of An Academic Search Engine

Shaurya Rohatgi, C. Lee Giles, Jian Wu

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

3 Scopus citations

Abstract

Academic search engines have served the research community for years, yet there is little work done on understanding the taxonomy of query semantics. In this work, we present our findings of analyzing the query log of an academic search engine in the past four years. We study the distribution of query intents to understand the information requested by users. We classify query strings by topics using shallow and latent features captured using a customized word embedding model. To this end, we create a dataset that has scientific keywords and titles labeled with fields of study. This dataset is later used to train a classifier that discriminates query logs by topics. Our work will help to train better learning-based ranking functions that improve user experiences for an academic search engine. In addition, we anonymize our 14, 759, 852 query logs and make them available to the research community for further exploration.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings - 2021 ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries, JCDL 2021
EditorsJ. Stephen Downie, Dana McKay, Hussein Suleman, David M. Nichols, Faryaneh Poursardar
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Pages342-343
Number of pages2
ISBN (Electronic)9781665417709
DOIs
StatePublished - 2021
Event21st ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries, JCDL 2021 - Virtual, Online, United States
Duration: Sep 27 2021Sep 30 2021

Publication series

NameProceedings of the ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries
Volume2021-September
ISSN (Print)1552-5996

Conference

Conference21st ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries, JCDL 2021
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityVirtual, Online
Period9/27/219/30/21

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • General Engineering

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'What Were People Searching For? A Query Log Analysis of An Academic Search Engine'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this