Determining relevance using queries as surrogate content

• US 20070005588A1
• Filed: 07/01/2005
• Published: 01/04/2007
• Est. Priority Date: 07/01/2005
• Status: Abandoned Application

• Current Assignee: Microsoft Technology Licensing LLC (Microsoft Corporation)
• Original Assignee: Microsoft Corporation
• Inventors: Ma, Wei-Ying, Chen, Zheng, Zhang, Benyu, Zeng, Hua-Jun, Xue, Gui-Rong
• Application Number:
  US11/174,438
• Publication Number:
  US 20070005588A1
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 1/1
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/951 Indexing; Web crawling techniques

Abstract

A method and system for determining the relevance of a document to a query based on surrogate content is provided. The relevance system associates queries with documents. The relevance system calculates the relevance of a document to a query based at least in part on the similarity of the associated queries to the query. When multiple queries are associated with a document, the relevance system may provide a weight for each query for calculating a combined relevance score for the associated queries.

Claims

1. A method for determining relevance of a document to a query, the method comprising:

associating queries with documents; and

calculating relevance of a document to a query based on similarity of the query to the queries paired with the document.

2. The method of claim 1 wherein the queries associated with a document are queries such that when a user submitted the query and received a query result, the user selected the document from the query result.

3. The method of claim 1 wherein the associating of queries with documents is based on analysis of click-through data.

4. The method of claim 1 including calculating a weight for queries associated with a document wherein the calculated relevance factors in the weight for a query.

5. The method of claim 1 including determining similarity between documents based on the documents based on their co-visited relationship and when a document is similar to another document, associating with the document selecting queries of the other document.

6. The method of claim 1 wherein a selecting query of a document is associated with another document based on the document and the other document being selected during the same query session.

7. The method of claim 1 including determining similarity between documents based on interdependence of the similarity of documents with the similarity of queries and when a document is similar to another document, associating with the document selecting queries of the other document.

8. The method of claim 1 wherein a selecting query of a document is associated with another document when the document and the other document are similar.

9. The method of claim 8 wherein documents are similar based on the similarity of their selecting queries.

10. The method of claim 9 wherein queries are similar based on the similarity of their selected documents.

11. A method for determining similarity of documents, the method comprising:

providing pairs of a selecting query and a selected document; and

calculating a similarity between documents from the provided pairs based on interdependence of similarity of documents and similarity of queries.

12. The method of claim 11 wherein the provided pairs are derived from analysis of click-through data.

13. The method of claim 11 wherein the similarity of documents is based on the similarity of their selecting queries and the similarity of queries is based on the similarity of their selected documents.

14. The method of claim 11 wherein similarity is calculated using the following equations:

$S_Q<br><br>\left[q_s,q_t\right]=\frac{C}{<br><br>O<br><br>\left(q_s\right)<br><br><br><br><br><br>O<br><br>\left(q_t\right)<br><br>}<br><br>\underset{i=1}{\overset{<br><br>O<br><br>\left(q_s\right)<br><br>}{\sum <br><br>}}<br><br>\underset{j=1}{\overset{<br><br>O<br><br>\left(q_t\right)<br><br>}{\sum <br><br>}}<br><br>\text{\hspace{1em}<br><br>}<br><br>S_D<br><br>\left[O^i<br><br>\left(q_s\right),O^j<br><br>\left(q_t\right)\right]<br><br>\text{\hspace{1em}<br><br>}$

where C is a decay factor, O(q) is the set of the selected documents of q, and Oⁱ(q) represents the ith document in the set, and

$S_D<br><br>\left[d_s,d_t\right]=\frac{C}{<br><br>I<br><br>\left(d_s\right)<br><br><br><br><br><br>I<br><br>\left(d_t\right)<br><br>}<br><br>\underset{i=1}{\overset{<br><br>I<br><br>\left(d_s\right)<br><br>}{\sum <br><br>}}<br><br>\underset{j=1}{\overset{<br><br>I<br><br>\left(d_t\right)<br><br>}{\sum <br><br>}}<br><br>S_Q<br><br>\left[I^i<br><br>\left(d_s\right),I^j<br><br>\left(d_t\right)\right]$

where C is a decay factor, I(d) is the set of the selecting queries of d, and Iⁱ(d) represents the ith query in the set.

15. The method of claim 11 including associating with a document the selecting queries of a similar document.

16. The method of claim 15 including calculating relevance of a document to a query based on the similarity of the associated queries to the query.

17. The method of claim 16 wherein each query associated with a document has a weight indicating how these similarities are to be weighted when calculating relevance.

18. A computer system for generating a query result, comprising:

a component that identifies queries and documents selected from the result of the queries;

a component that associates queries with a document based on analysis of the identified queries and documents;

a component that receives a query and calculates relevance of the received query to a document based on the queries associated with the document; and

a component that uses the calculated relevance in providing a result of the query.

19. The computer system of claim 18 wherein a selecting query of a document is associated with another document when the document and the other document are co-visited.

20. The computer system of claim 18 wherein a selecting query of a document is associated with another document when the document and the other document are similar and wherein the similarity of documents is calculated based on interdependence of similarity of documents and similarity of queries.