Generating Simulated Relevance Feedback: A Prognostic Search approach

Implicit relevance feedback has proved to be a important resource in improving search accuracy and personalization. However, researchers who rely on feedback data for testing their algorithms or other personalization related problems are loomed with problems like unavailability of data, staling up of data and so on. Given these problems, we are motivated towards creating a synthetic user relevance feedback data, based on insights from query log analysis. We call this simulated feedback. We believe that simulated feedback can be immensely beneficial to web search engine and personalization research communities by greatly reducing efforts involved in collecting user feedback. The benefits from ”Simulated feedback” are it is easy to obtain and also the process of obtaining the feedback data is repeatable, customizable and does not need the interactions of the user. In this paper, we describe a simple yet effective approach for creating simulated feedback. We have evaluated our system using the clickthrough data of the users and achieved 77% accuracy in generating click-through data.