Toward action comprehension for searching : Mining actionable intents in query entities

Understanding search engine users’ intents has been a popular study in information retrieval, which directly affects the quality of retrieved information. One of the fundamental problems in this field is to find a connection between the entity in a query and the potential intents of the users, the latter of which would further reveal important information for facilitating the users’ future actions. In this paper, we present a novel research for mining the actionable intents for search users, by generating a ranked list of the potentially most informative actions based on a massive pool of action samples. We compare different search strategies and their combinations for retrieving the action pool and develop three criteria for measuring the informativeness of the selected action samples, i.e. the significance of an action sample within the pool, the representativeness of an action sample for the other candidate samples, and the diverseness of an action sample with respect to the selected actions. Our experiment based on the Action Mining (AM) query entity dataset from Actionable Knowledge Graph (AKG) task at NTCIR-13 suggests that the proposed approach is effective in generating an informative and early-satisfying ranking of potential actions for search users.

This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: Kang, X., Wu, Y., Ren, F., Toward action comprehension for searching : Mining actionable intents in query entities. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 71, 2, 143-157., which has been published in final form at https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24220. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Use of Self-Archived Versions. This article may not be enhanced, enriched or otherwise transformed into a derivative work, without express permission from Wiley or by statutory rights under applicable legislation. Copyright notices must not be removed, obscured or modified. The article must be linked to Wiley’s version of record on Wiley Online Library and any embedding, framing or otherwise making available the article or pages thereof by third parties from platforms, services and websites other than Wiley Online Library must be prohibited.