Effective Mobile Search Using Element-based Retrieval

抄録

We applied an element-based retrieval approach in this study to improve search accuracy for information retrieval on small screen devices. Finer-grained retrieval units compared with document granules are expected in mobile information retrieval because of limited screen size. An information retrieval system employing information units (iUnits), i.e., text fragments that are relevant to a query and atomic in interpreting information, is one of the solutions to finer-grained retrieval units. An iUnit-based mobile information retrieval task, called MobileClick, assumes two-layered information access where the most important iUnits are arranged in the first layer and detailed iUnits for individual intents are arranged in the second layer. This two-layered information access enabled useful information to be presented with fewer page transitions. We first adopt element-based retrieval to identify elements containing relevant descriptions in a document to tackle MobileClick. The next step is scoring the iUnits where we assigned higher scores to iUnits that are similar to elements with higher scores. Our experimental evaluations demonstrated that our method is more accurate than a baseline by 9.7%.