Query simplification
AssigneeMicrosoft Corporation
InventorsYe-Yi Wang, Xiaodong He, Xiaolong Li, Shihao Ji, Bin Zhang
Life of this patent
Estimating the term…
Abstract
Methods, systems, and computer-readable media for query simplification are provided. A search engine executed by a server receives a query. In response, the search engine determines whether the query is a long or hard query. For long or hard queries, the search engine drops one or more terms based on search engine logs. The search engine may utilize statistical models like machine translation, condition random fields, or max entropy, to identify the terms that should be dropped. The search engine obtains search results for the simplified query and transmits the results to a user that provided the query.
Claims20
One or more computer-readable media having computer-executable instructions embodied thereon that when executed by a computing device perform a method for query simplification, the method comprising:
- determining whether a query received at the search interface is long or hard;
- when the query is long or hard, performing the following:
- applying one or more statistical models to the query to generate simplified queries,
- issuing the one or more simplified queries to one or more search engines,
- obtaining search results for the one or more simplified queries from the one or more search engines;
- merging the search results for the one or more simplified queries, and
- transmitting the merged results to a user for display;
- and
- when the query is not long or hard, performing the following:
- issuing the query to at least one search engine,
- obtaining search results for the query, and
- transmitting the search results to a user for display.
A computer implemented method for identifying results for a query, the method comprising:
- simplifying a query received at a search engine by dropping one or more terms;
- selecting search results based on the terms that remain excluding the terms that are dropped;
- ranking the search results using all of the terms of the query including the dropped terms;
- and
- transmitting the ranked results for display to a user.
A computer system for query simplification, the system comprising a search engine configured to receive queries and provide search results to the queries, wherein the search engine implements the following:
- a filter component configured to determine whether query simplification is needed for the received queries;
- a query simplification component configured to obtain the received queries from the filter component when the filter component selects the query for simplification, wherein during simplification the query simplification component drops one or more terms of the received queries based on a search engine log;
- and
- a result component to obtain the search results for the one or more queries generated by the query simplification component.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.