Determining the User Intent of Chinese-English Mixed Language Queries Based On Search Logs

With the increasing number of multilingual web pages on the Internet, multilingual information retrieval has become an important research topic. While queries are the key element of information retrieval process, mixed-language queries have not yet been adequately studied. This study is to determine the user intents of Chinese-English mixed-language queries submitted to a Chinese search engine, and compares the user intents identified by query content to those identified using additional user behavior data (e.g. clicked results, subsequent queries). The preliminary findings present the distributions of user intents by analyzing query only and additional user behavior data, suggesting a specific searching behavior of Chinese-English mixed-language queries users. The findings of this study could provide useful insights in understanding the searching behavior of Chinese-English mixed-language queries users, and enable web search engines to provide users with more relevant results and more precisely targeted sponsored links.ye