Towards an Understanding of Entity-Oriented Search Intents

TL;DR

This paper investigates the diverse intents behind entity-oriented searches, categorizing them and analyzing query refiners to understand user needs for information retrieval and service interaction.

Contribution

It introduces a scheme of entity intent categories and applies it to annotate query refiners, revealing predominant interaction and lookup behaviors.

Findings

Over half of query refiners seek to interact with services.

Over a quarter of refiners search for information in knowledge bases.

Entity intent categories help understand user search behaviors.

Abstract

Entity-oriented search deals with a wide variety of information needs, from displaying direct answers to interacting with services. In this work, we aim to understand what are prominent entity-oriented search intents and how they can be fulfilled. We develop a scheme of entity intent categories, and use them to annotate a sample of queries. Specifically, we annotate unique query refiners on the level of entity types. We observe that, on average, over half of those refiners seek to interact with a service, while over a quarter of the refiners search for information that may be looked up in a knowledge base.