I Know What You Need: Investigating Document Retrieval Effectiveness with Partial Session Contexts

Reducing user effort in finding relevant information is one of the key objectives of search systems. Existing approaches have been shown to effectively exploit the context from the current search session of users for automatically suggesting queries to reduce their search efforts. However, these approaches do not accomplish the end goal of a search system—that of retrieving a set of potentially relevant documents for the evolving information need during a search session. This article takes the problem of query prediction one step further by investigating the problem of contextual recommendation within a search session. More specifically, given the partial context information of a session in the form of a small number of queries, we investigate how a search system can effectively predict the documents that a user would have been presented with had he continued the search session by submitting subsequent queries. To address the problem, we propose a model of contextual recommendation that seeks to capture the underlying semantics of information need transitions of a current user’s search context. This model leverages information from a number of past interactions of other users with similar interactions from an existing search log. To identify similar interactions, as a novel contribution, we propose an embedding approach that jointly learns representations of both individual query terms and also those of queries (in their entirety) from a search log data by leveraging session-level containment relationships. Our experiments conducted on a large query log, namely the AOL, demonstrate that using a joint embedding of queries and their terms within our proposed framework of document retrieval outperforms a number of text-only and sequence modeling based baselines.