Gazpacho and summer rash: lexical relationships from temporal patterns of web search queries

In this paper we investigate temporal patterns of web search queries. We carry out several evaluations to analyze the properties of temporal profiles of queries, revealing promising semantic and pragmatic relationships between words. We focus on two applications: query suggestion and query categorization. The former shows a potential for time-series similarity measures to identify specific semantic relatedness between words, which results in state-of-the-art performance in query suggestion while providing complementary information to more traditional distributional similarity measures. The query categorization evaluation suggests that the temporal profile alone is not a strong indicator of broad topical categories.