Query Term Ranking based on Search Results Overlap

摘要

In this paper, we propose a method to rank and assign weights to query terms according to their impact on the topic of the query. We use Search Result Overlap Ratio (SROR) to quantify the overlap of the search results of the full query and a shorten query after removing one term. Intuitively, if the overlap is small, it indicates a big topic shift and the removed term should be discriminative and important. The SROR could be used for measuring query term importance with a search engine automatically. By this way. learning based models could be trained based on a large number of automatically labeled instances and make predictions for future queries efficiently.