Acquiring Knowledge About Explicit User Goals from Search Query Logs

Access to knowledge about user goals represents a critical component for realizing the vision of intelligent agents acting upon user intent on the web. Yet, the acquisition of knowledge about user goals represents a major challenge. In a departure from existing approaches, this paper proposes a novel perspective for knowledge acquisition: The utilization of search query logs for this task. The research presented in this paper makes the following contributions: (a) it presents an automatic method for the acquisition of user goals from search query logs with useful precision/recall scores (b) it provides insights into the nature and some characteristics of these goals and (c) it shows that the goals acquired from query logs exhibit traits of a long tail distribution, thereby providing access to a broad range of user goals. We conclude that our work has implications for open research problems such as common sense knowledge acquisition and studies of user intent in query logs.