skip to main content
10.1145/1460027.1460037acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagescikmConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

Query selection for improved Greek web searches

Published: 30 October 2008 Publication History

Abstract

As the Web becomes an integral part of our everyday life and the Internet-literate population grows rapidly, the Search Engine market is steadily gaining a high monetary value. Unfortunately, today, the distribution of the search market share is dominated by English-speaking users and stakeholders, basically because English is the lingua franca of the Web. Thus, although the majority of the Web users are non-English native speakers, they naturally gravitate to using English in order to explore the plentiful Web content. In this paper, we propose a query selection mechanism for assisting users perform successful non-English Web searches. Our mechanism combines linguistic analysis and Web mining techniques and aims at assisting users select informative and well-specified queries for expressing their information needs in languages other than English. Our technique is validated on a dataset of 70 Greek queries issued to Google search engine over a period of 3 weeks. Obtained results demonstrate that our query selection mechanism yields improved retrieval performance compared to existing non-English search strategies and as such we believe that it can be fruitfully deployed for other natural languages.

References

[1]
Baeza-Yates, R., Castillo, C. and Efthimiadis, E. 2004. Comparing the characteristics of the Chilean and the Greek Web. Technical Report http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/680836.html
[2]
Baeza-Yates, R., Castillo, C. and Efthimiadis, E. 2007. Characterization of national Web domains. In ACM Transactions on Internet Technology, 7(2), Article 9.
[3]
Bar-Ilan, J. and Gutman, T. 2005. How do search engines respond to some non-English queries? Journal of Information Science, 31(1): 13--28.
[4]
Billerbeck, B., Scholer, F., Williams, H.E. and Zobel L. 2003. Query expansion using associated queries. In Proceedings of the ACM CIKM Conference.
[5]
Chan, M., Fang, X. and Yang, C.C. 2007. Web searching in Chinese: a study of a search engine in Hong Kong. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 58(7): 1004--1054.
[6]
DeLuca, E.W. and Nurnberger, A. 2006. Adaptive support for cross-language text retrieval. In Proceedings of the Intl. Conference in Adaptive Hypermedia and Adaptive Web-Based Systems, pp. 425--429.
[7]
Efthimiadis, E., Malevris, N., Kousaridas, A., Lepeniotou, A. and Loutas, N. 2008. How search engines respond to Greek language queries. In Proceedings of the IEEE Intl. Conference on System Sciences, Hawaii.
[8]
Grigoriadou, M., Kornilakis, H., Galiotou E., Stamou, S. and Papakitsos, E. 2004. The software infrastructure for the development and validation of the Greek WordNet. In Romanian Journal of Information Science and Technology, 7(1-2).
[9]
Gong, Z., Cheang, C.W. and Hou, C. 2005. Web query expansion by WordNet. In Proceedings of the DEXA Conference.
[10]
Gey, F.C., Kando, N. and Peters, C. 2005. Cross-language information retrieval: the way ahead. Information Processing and Management, 41(3): 415--431.
[11]
Harman, D. 1988. Towards interactive query expansion. In Proceedings of the 11th Intl. Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, pp. 321--331.
[12]
Jansen, B.J. and Spink, A. 2005. An analysis of Web search-ing by European AlltheWeb.com users. In Information Processing and Management, vol.41, pp. 361--381.
[13]
Mchedlidze, T., Symvonis, A. and Tzagarakis, M. 2007. Analysis of the Greek Web-space. In Proceedings of the 11th Panhellenic Conference on Informatics, Patras, Greece.
[14]
Moukhad, H. and Large, A. 2001. Information retrieval from full-text Arabic databases: can search engines designed for English do the job? In Libri, pp. 63--74.
[15]
Neumann, G. and Xu, F. 2003. Mining answers in German Web pages. In Proceedings of the Conference on Web Intelligence.
[16]
Lampos, Ch., Eirinaki, M., Jevtuchova, D. and Vazirgiannis, M. 2004. Archiving the Greek Web. In Proceedings of the 4th Intl. Web Archiving Workshop, Bath, UK.
[17]
Lazarinis, F. Web retrieval systems and the Greek language: Do they have an understanding?. 2007. In Journal of Information Science, pp. 1--15.
[18]
Ntoulas, A., Stamou, S. and Tzagarakis, M. 2001. Using a WWW search engine to evaluate normalization performance in a highly inflectional language. In Proceedings of the ACL/EACL Student Research Workshop, France.
[19]
Pew Internet American Life Project. 2005. Search engine users: Internet searchers are confident, satisfied and trusting- but they are also unaware and naïve. Report a available at: http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_Searchengine_users.pdf
[20]
Pirkola, A. 1999. Studies on linguistic problems and methods in text retrieval: the effects of anaphor and ellipsis resolution in proximity searching and translation and query structuring methods in cross-language retrieval. Ph.D. Dissertation
[21]
Qin, J., Zhou, Y., Chan, M. and Chen, H. 2003. Supporting multilingual information retrieval in Web applications: an English-Chinese Web portal experiment. In proceedings of the 6th Intl. Conference on Asian Digital Libraries, pp.149--152.
[22]
Salton, G. and McGill, M.J. 1983. Introduction to Modern Information Retrieval. McGraw-Hill, ISBN: 0070544840.
[23]
Salton, G. and Buckley, C. 1990. Improving retrieval performance by relevance feedback. In Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 41(4), pp. 288--297.
[24]
Spink, A., Ozmultu, S., Ozmultu, H.C. and Jansen, B.J. 2002. U.S. versus European Web searching trends. In ACM SIGIR Forum, vol.15. no.2.
[25]
Spink, A. 2003. Web search: Emerging patterns. In Library Trends, vol. 52, no.2, pp. 299--306.
[26]
Sroka, M. 2000. Web search engines for Polish information retrieval: questions of search capabilities and retrieval performance. Information and Library Research, 32.
[27]
Stamou, S. and Christodoulakis, D. 2005. Retrieval efficiency of normalized query expansion. In Proceedings of the 6th Intl. Conference on Computational Linguistics and Intelligent Text Processing. Mexico, pp. 604--607.
[28]
Tzekou, P., Stamou, S., Zotos, N. and Kozanidis, L. 2007. Querying the Greek Web in Greeklish. In Proceedings of the SIGIR Workshop on Improving non-English Web Searching, Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
[29]
Tzekou, P., Kozanidis, L., Christodoulakis, D. and Stamou, S. 2006. Combining statistical and lexical processing for query refinement. In Proceedings of the 5th Intl. Conference on Formal Approaches to South Slavic & Balkan Languages.
[30]
WordNet: hhtp://wordnet.princeton.edu.
[31]
Wu, Z. and Palmer, M. 1998. Web semantics and lexical selection. In Proceedings of the 32nd ACL Meeting.
[32]
Smyth, B., Balfe, E., Freyne, J., Briggs, P., Coyle, M. and Boydell, D. 2005. Exploiting query repetition and regularity in an adaptive community-based web search engine. In User Modeling and User Adapted Interaction, 14(5): 383--423.
[33]
Kammenhuber, N., Luxenburger, J., Feldmann, A. and Wei-kum, G. 2006. Web search clickstreams. In Proceedings of the 6th ACM SIGCOMM Conference on Intern Measurement, pp. 245--250.

Recommendations

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences
iNEWS '08: Proceedings of the 2nd ACM workshop on Improving non english web searching
October 2008
112 pages
ISBN:9781605584164
DOI:10.1145/1460027
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Sponsors

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 30 October 2008

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Check for updates

Author Tags

  1. Greek web search
  2. linguistic analysis
  3. query selection
  4. semantics
  5. text mining

Qualifiers

  • Research-article

Conference

CIKM08
CIKM08: Conference on Information and Knowledge Management
October 30, 2008
California, Napa Valley, USA

Upcoming Conference

CIKM '25

Contributors

Other Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

  • 0
    Total Citations
  • 168
    Total Downloads
  • Downloads (Last 12 months)0
  • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0
Reflects downloads up to 10 Feb 2025

Other Metrics

Citations

View Options

Login options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

PDF

eReader

View online with eReader.

eReader

Figures

Tables

Media

Share

Share

Share this Publication link

Share on social media