Acquiring Explicit User Goals from Search Query Logs

Knowledge about user goals is crucial for realizing the vision of intelligent agents acting upon user intent on the Web. In a departure from existing approaches, this paper proposes a novel approach to the problem of user goal acquisition: The utilization of search query logs for this task. The paper makes the following contributions: (a) it presents an automatic method for the acquisition of user goals from search query logs with useful precision/recall scores (b) it provides insights into the nature and some characteristics of these goals and (c) it shows that the goals acquired from query logs exhibit traits of a long tail distribution.