Converting Topics of User Query Sequences for Cooperative Web Search

In this paper, we propose a method of converting a given sequence of search queries about a certain topic into a sequence of search queries about a given different topic. We define the concept of a search skeleton for topic conversion. A search skeleton represents relationships between keywords in a query. A given sequence of search queries is converted into a sequence of search skeletons, which are in turn converted into a sequence of search queries about the target topic. We evaluated our method of search query conversion and found that the precision for deciding types of subtopic keywords in search queries was 84.4%, the precision for finding relational keywords was 35.7%, and the precision for converting dynamic subtopic keywords was 40.0%.