Generating queries from user-selected text

Chia-Jung Lee, W. Bruce Croft
2012 Proceedings of the 4th Information Interaction in Context Symposium on - IIIX '12  
People browsing the web or reading a document may see text passages that describe a topic of interest, and want to know more about it by searching. Manually formulating a query from that text can be difficult, however, and an effective search is not guaranteed. In this paper, to address this scenario, we propose a learning-based approach which generates effective queries from the content of an arbitrary userselected text passage. Specifically, the approach extracts and selects representative
more » ... nks (noun phrases or named entities) from the content (a text passage) using a rich set of features. We carry out experiments showing that the selected chunks can be effectively used to generate queries both in a TREC environment, where weights and query structure can be directly incorporated, and with a "black-box" web search engine, where query structure is more limited.
doi:10.1145/2362724.2362744 dblp:conf/iiix/LeeC12 fatcat:y2gcyte2inhtlasxz76t7hzdeq