When is a query a question? Reconstructing wh-requests from ad hoc-queries

Search engine queries are often very short and usually lack explicit semantic structure or indication of intent. Recog­ nizing in tent is receiving increased atten tion since it enables a search engine to trigger a dedicated answer and presen­ ta tion module. This way search engines increasingly move from a docum ent ranking system to an answer facility. In this study we investigate whether it is possible to infer a hidden wh-request from a subset of all twoand three-word queries, based on the syntactic form of the queries. By ana­ lyzing dependency relations between the term s in the queries we gain insight in the structure of queries th a t are likely to have a wh-question as underlying intent. The goal of recon­ structing a question from a keyword query is to be able to provide the user w ith an answer to th a t question, instead of only returning a list of documents.