The Linguistic Structure of English Web-Search Queries

Web-search queries are known to be short, but little else is known about their structure. In this paper we investigate the applicability of part-of-speech tagging to typical Englishlanguage web search-engine queries and the potential value of these tags for improving search results. We begin by identifying a set of part-of-speech tags suitable for search queries and quantifying their occurrence. We find that proper-nouns constitute 40% of query terms, and proper nouns and nouns together constitute over 70% of query terms. We also show that the majority of queries are nounphrases, not unstructured collections of terms. We then use a set of queries manually labeled with these tags to train a Brill tagger and evaluate its performance. In addition, we investigate classification of search queries into grammatical classes based on the syntax of part-of-speech tag sequences. We also conduct preliminary investigative experiments into the practical applicability of leveraging query-trained par...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: EMNLP
• Authors: Cory Barr, Rosie Jones, Moira Regelson
• Keywords: EMNLP 2008, Natural Language Processing, Part-of-speech, Part-of-speech Tag, Web-search Queries