Bridging link and query intent to enhance web search

Abstract

Understanding query intent is essential to generating appropriate rankings for users. Existing methods have provided customized rankings to answer queries with different intent. While previous methods have shown improvement over their non-discriminating counterparts, the web authors' intent when creating a hyperlink is seldom taken into consideration. To mitigate this gap, we categorize hyperlinks into two types that are reasonably comparable to query intent, i.e., links describing the target page's identity and links describing the target page's content. We argue that emphasis on one type of link when ranking documents can benefit the retrieval for that type of query. We start by presenting a link intent classification approach based on the link context representations that captures evidence from anchors, target pages, and their associated links, and then introduce our enhanced retrieval model that incorporates link intent into the estimation of anchor text importance. Comparative experiments on two large scale web corpora demonstrate the efficacy of our approaches.