[ACM Press the sixth ACM international conference - Rome, Italy (2013.02.04-2013.02.08)] Proceedings of the sixth ACM international conference on Web search and data mining - WSDM '13 - Personalizing atypical web search sessions

✍ Scribed by Eickhoff, Carsten; Collins-Thompson, Kevyn; Bennett, Paul N.; Dumais, Susan

• Book ID: 125473698
• Publisher: ACM Press
• Year: 2013
• Weight: 559 KB
• Category: Article
• ISBN: 145031869X
• DOI: 10.1145/2433396.2433434

✦ Synopsis

Most research in Web search personalization models users as static or slowly evolving entities with a given set of preferences defined by their past behavior. However, recent publications as well as empirical evidence suggest that for a significant number of search sessions, users diverge from their regular search profiles in order to satisfy atypical, limitedduration information needs. In this work, we conduct a large-scale inspection of real-life search sessions to further understand this scenario. Subsequently, we design an automatic means of detecting and supporting such atypical sessions. We demonstrate significant improvements over stateof-the-art Web search personalization techniques by accounting for the typicality of search sessions. The proposed method is evaluated based on Web-scale search session data spanning several months of user activity.