Patent Application
20050131872
The present invention relates to automated query analyzers for efficiently providing answers to queries.
One goal of a query search engine is providing a rapid response to the query. An on line user faced with a slow responding search engine can react by trying to resubmit the search, stopping the search and going to another search engine, or perhaps trying to reformulate the search to seek faster results. It is desirable if the results can be returned to the user quickly enough to prevent the user from attempting these solutions to a perceived problem in the speed in obtaining a result.
A publication entitled “Clustering User Queries of a Search engine” to Wen et al. describes a process whose goal is to increase search engine retrieval accuracy. The Wen et al paper clusters queries so that a pre-formulated FAQ (frequently asked questions) document can be presented to the person asking the query. For example, if the clustering process determines a query is asking about ‘new cars’ then the ‘new car’ FAQ document is returned as a response to the ‘new car’ query. This approach presupposes the existence of a FAQ document for each query cluster and also presupposes the existence of a matching cluster for every query that is submitted to the search engine. The web site www.ask.com provides means whereby a user can ask for query results and this site may use techniques similar to those disclosed in the Wen et al article.
If analysis software that forms part of a query search engine can accurately identify the query according to its category, then the search engine can respond more rapidly to the query.
An exemplary system analyzes queries from a user and responds to the queries with data. A query processor evaluates a query and transmits a form of the query to another data source for creating a response to the modified form of the query. The system implements a recognizer component that evaluates the query or a modified form of the query and identifies a type of query. In on exemplary embodiment the query processor including a recognizer broker for sending the query to a specified one or more of the plurality of recognizers.
One such recognizer is a word or token match recognizer. The system matches query input words or tokens with words stored in a database and categorizes those words with a confidence level. The confidence level is derived from database records that define a history of user ratings for use previously submitted queries.
These and other objects, advantages and features of the invention are described in greater detail in conjunction with the accompanying drawings.
The search engine software executing on the server 20, possibly in conjunction with other federated search engines, provides a rapid response to the query. The response is provided to the user in the form of search results 12, typically transmitted back to the user over a network such as the Internet. The response can be formulated as a series of article or web site summaries with links to those articles or web sites embedded in the search results. A computer system 20 that can serve as a suitable query response computer is depicted in
The exemplary computer system 20 includes software that defines the query processor 10 for evaluating the query. One possible response to receipt of a query 11 is to re-transmit a modified form of the query to another server that performs a search based on the modified form of the query. As an example, the other source of search results could be a server hosting a travel web site that provides data about airfares, hotels etc. It could be a religious web site that maintains a list of churches in a country. It could be a site dedicated to automobile information that in turn has links to car dealerships. Other, of course non exhaustive categories are: news, local, sports, encyclopedia, history, books, movies, entertainment etc.
The server computer system 20 depicted in
In order to efficiently utilize search engines at other locations, the computer system 20 utilizes a plurality of recognizers 220 (
Query Preprocessing
The server 20 includes a query processor component 14 that performs several functions on an input query.
Each Internet service provider (or Country or Company) obtains an IP range class A, B or C, and partitions the 32 bits available to it for its own needs. In most instances, it is possible to associate an IP to a city due to the presence of the company Internet connection location. This reverse lookup is not always accurate, for example, all AOL users have IP addresses originating in Virginia.
The query processor next performs several functions on the query to modify or augment the query to optimize analysis of the query. The purpose of this augmentation is to quickly return results that are likely most relevant to this particular user.
At a stage 130 the query processor performs a spell check on the query and either changes the spelling of terms in the query that are misspelled or augments the query with correctly spelled terms. The query processor scans the spell corrected query for terms that should be grouped as phrases 135. The query processor may use information about commonly executed queries to determine which terms should be grouped as phrases.
At step 140 the query processor identifies or recognizes words within a phrase that serve as indicators that the query is of a certain type such as a local query that is location sensitive or queries that are searching for items to be purchased. The identification of these words or terms may cause the query processor to augment the query with context specific information such as zip code or area code information based on the geographical origin from which the query originates.
At this stage, each phrase of a query is broken, stemmed and analyzed by a query parser 200 and recognizer broker 210 for concept or category matching. These concepts based strictly on content, in conjunction with past data collected for a particular user, identify possible federation results, i.e. where to broker the query for most efficient analysis. Federation is defined as the “handing off” of a query to a separate service (either internal or external) in order to provide data pertinent to the query for producing a result to the query. During a recognition phase a number of query recognizers 221, 222, 223, 224 etc evaluate the query and determine for the recognizer broker 210 a probability of the query belonging to one of a predefined set of categories.
Three separate modules or components are employed at the parser level of query pre-processing. A word breaker separates each phrase of a query into separate words and stores these words in an output array or list. A stemmer component attempts to find a root of each word from the word breaker output array and will create a corresponding array of root words. Finally, a recognizer component will attempt to match the root words (or actual words for words having no root) against intent lists stored in a database 230 to discover the intent of the words. The recognizer component also searches for patterns using an algorithmic query intent recognizer. The results of this analysis provides a category and degree of confidence as a percentage. Consider the query entered by a user of the form “compare price Buick and Satturn”.
Table 1 below is a listing of the results of this analysis of the recognizer 221 on this query.
At a stage 150 (
Based on the finalized query and determined query type, the query processor selects a set of data sources upon which to execute the query in step 160. The query is a modified query of the form “compare price Saturn and Buick cat: cars: 80.” This form of the query indicates that the preprocessor 14 has corrected the spelling of the word “Saturn” and augmented the query with a confidence level of 80% that the query concerns the category “cars.”
At a stage 170 the query (as enhanced by the recognizer) may be executed concurrently on the data sources or preferred data sources may be accessed first and other data sources used in the case the preferred data sources do not provide sufficient results or “time out” due to overload or technical difficulties.
The data source or provider can be an internal provider running on a web server 20 or an external provider such as Encarta, Expedia, Overture, Inktomi, Yellow Pages etc. The data source is provided the enhanced query and the query configuration based such as “en-us” meaning English language query originating in the United States. From a list of all possible data sources, two lists are built on the enhanced query and the query configuration. A first list is a list of sources that do not depend on other data sources and a second list of those sources that do depend on other sources. Sources on the first list are called first in parallel and then those sources having dependency on sources in the first list are called.
In order to provide results to popular queries quickly, the query processor 10 caches the results to popular queries. Queries that seek results similar to the queries whose results were cached are directed first to the appropriate cache. The caches may be updated at different intervals depending on the rate at which the cached information changes, i.e. daily or hourly. Queries that have been identified as local queries are directed to a yellow pages type directory data source. Queries that have been identified as car queries are directed to car selling data sources.
The returned results are de-duplicated, and ranked by a post processing component 18. The results are presented to the user based on context information and query type. The presentation of the ranked results may be personalized based on recorded user preferences. The ranked results may also be recorded to an instrumentation database that records original queries, resultant queries, results, and which results were selected by the user. The instrumentation database is used to monitor the success of the search engine.
Recognizer Broker 210
Returning to the recognizer broker 210 a number of points are highlighted. First, there are a number of recognizers 221, 222 etc. In one embodiment the broker 210 merely causes each recognizer to evaluate the modified form of the query and return a predicted category of query. In an alternate embodiment, the broker 210 chooses the recognizer based on other information derived from the source of the query. If for example the address of the user indicates a country source as ‘Spain’ sending the query to a list match recognizer of English language words is inefficient so that the broker uses the information available to it to make an intelligent choice about the recognizers to utilize. Some of the brokers are not word based but are algorithmic and use heuristics rules to search for intent such as recognized patterns. If a string of five digits appears in the query for example, the recognizer for identifying zip codes will respond with a high level of confidence that this is a local search query relating to searches regarding a particular area of the country. In a similar fashion a recognizer searches for telephone patterns.
In the exemplary embodiment, the recognizers are of two types, algorithmic or list match. An algorithmic query intent recognizer uses heuristic rules to determine what the user meant by the words that he or she typed. One example is phone numbers. The rule to detect if a phone number was typed could be: three digits followed by a separator followed by seven digits or three digits followed by a separator followed by four more digits. So, if the user types “(425) 882-8080” the recognizer borker flags this query as a phone number with a high degree of confidence. This could help the federation broker which source or provider to contact. Other examples of algorithmic query intent recognizers are:
As mentioned above the list match query intent recognizers are based on dictionary lookup schemes. For each entry in the dictionary, the database has a word or phrase by itself, the candidate category and the probability of a match. One subset of the entries in the database 230 might include the following entries.
If a user types a query like “Paris Hotel in Las Vegas”, an appropriate query recognizer will indicate that specific parts of the query contain city (Paris, Las Vegas), contain hotel (Paris) and contain travel (Hotel). The recognizer reports not only what category each word or phrase belongs to, but the position on the phrase. On the example above, the results of this query of “Paris Hotel in Las Vegas” would be:
The confidence levels attributed to words within a query by the recognizer 221 for example (the English language list match recognizer) is based on a history of previous searches. The database 230 maintains a list of words and categories for words based on the search history maintained in the database. From the above example, the database knows from past experience that when a user is presented results from a query that contains the word “Saturn” he or she is likely to be interested in the ‘Car’ category 68% of the time because he or she clicks on a link to such a category with that frequency when presented a result of a query that contains the word “Saturn.”
The results of Table 1 are summarized as a result having combined confidence level based on the words of the query. Two words had a relatively high confidence level for cars and two words had a high confidence level for shopping. The federation component 16 can send the query to two specialized search engines, one relating to shopping and one to cars. It may also know that there is a special search site suitable for “car shopping.”
Other uses of the Query Intent Recognition phase would be wherein the Web Server executing the query intent recognizer could selectively display (or not display) advertisements if a certain category appears. For example, the server might display a “Toyota ad” on the “Results” Web page if the category of the query was “cars.” Another response a choice not to display content. For example, if the recognizer analyzes a query and determines it contains an “adult term”, such as “live sex” the software could use this information to suppress specific federations or suppress elements of the results of the search results page. At the present time server software presenting ad promotions can extract portions of the query verbatim and add those extracted portions for advertisers paying for such a service. Use of the recognizer could enhance such a service by automatically added content not contained in the query as well as suppressing ads for certain customers in the event the query contains offensive language.
Alternate exemplary embodiments are not limited to query categorization and concern query augmentation. Consider these two examples:
A users enters the phrase “Restaurants in Redmond, Wash.” by means of a search text box in his or her browser. The recognizer augments the query to form the phrase “Restaurants in Redmond, Wash. zip:98052:90 cat:local:60”, where “zip:98052:90” means that there is a 90% chance of this referring to zip code 98052, a useful piece of information for a search engine. Furthermore, the categorization of local:60 means with 60% confidence this is a request for local search content.
The user types “News about Iraq” and the recognizer augments the query this way: “News about Iraq cat: news: 80 ranking: date: 30” where “cat: news: 80” means there is an 80% chance of being a news category and “ranking:date: 30” means that the ranker should use of weight of 30% for the date field.
Computer System 20
As seen by referring to
The system memory includes read only memory (ROM) 24 and random access memory (RAM) 25. A basic input/output system 26 (BIOS), containing the basic routines that help to transfer information between elements within the computer 20, such as during start-up, is stored in ROM 24.
The computer 20 further includes a hard disk drive 27 for reading from and writing to a hard disk, not shown, a magnetic disk drive 28 for reading from or writing to a removable magnetic disk 29, and an optical disk drive 30 for reading from or writing to a removable optical disk 31 such as a CD ROM or other optical media. The hard disk drive 27, magnetic disk drive 28, and optical disk drive 30 are connected to the system bus 23 by a hard disk drive interface 32, a magnetic disk drive interface 33, and an optical drive interface 34, respectively. The drives and their associated computer-readable media provide nonvolatile storage of computer readable instructions, data structures, program modules and other data for the computer 20. Although the exemplary environment described herein employs a hard disk, a removable magnetic disk 29 and a removable optical disk 31, it should be appreciated by those skilled in the art that other types of computer readable media which can store data that is accessible by a computer, such as magnetic cassettes, flash memory cards, digital video disks, Bernoulli cartridges, random access memories (RAM), read only memories (ROM), and the like, may also be used in the exemplary operating environment.
A number of program modules including the data mining software component 12 may be stored on the hard disk, magnetic disk 29, optical disk 31, ROM 24 or RAM 25, including an operating system 35, one or more application programs 36, other program modules 37, and program data 38. A user may enter commands and information into the computer 20 through input devices such as a keyboard 40 and pointing device 42. Other input devices (not shown) may include a microphone, joystick, game pad, satellite dish, scanner, or the like. These and other input devices are often connected to the processing unit 21 through a serial port interface 46 that is coupled to the system bus, but may be connected by other interfaces, such as a parallel port, game port or a universal serial bus (USB). A monitor 47 or other type of display device is also connected to the system bus 23 via an interface, such as a video adapter 48. In addition to the monitor, personal computers typically include other peripheral output devices (not shown), such as speakers and printers.
The computer 20 may operate in a networked environment using logical connections to one or more remote computers, such as a remote computer 49. The remote computer 49 may be another personal computer, a server, a router, a network PC, a peer device or other common network node, and typically includes many or all of the elements described above relative to the computer 20, although only a memory storage device 50 has been illustrated in
When used in a LAN networking environment, the computer 20 is connected to the local network 51 through a network interface or adapter 53. When used in a WAN networking environment, the computer 20 typically includes a modem 54 or other means for establishing communications over the wide area network 52, such as the Internet. The modem 54, which may be internal or external, is connected to the system bus 23 via the serial port interface 46. In a networked environment, program modules depicted relative to the computer 20, or portions thereof, may be stored in the remote memory storage device. It will be appreciated that the network connections shown are exemplary and other means of establishing a communications link between the computers may be used.
It can be seen from the foregoing description that building and maintaining statistical information on intermediate query results can result in more efficient query plans. Although the present invention has been described with a degree of particularity, it is the intent that the invention include all modifications and alterations from the disclosed design falling within the spirit or scope of the appended claims.
