Towards a Deeper Understanding of the User’s Query Intent

The identification of the user’s intent behind a web query is considered to be one of the most important challenges for the modern information retrieval systems. Although there have been studies that characterize some possible dimensions for the user intents, most of these studies just place each query into one or two dimensions. In order to approach to the real world, search engines need to have a better understanding of the user’s intent and its multidimentional nature. In this paper we study, analyze and characterize a wide range of facets or dimensions that may be useful for user’s intents identification when searching for information on the Web. We outline the relationships and dependencies that exist between these dimensions, and identify the contributions of each in the task of accurately recognizing user’s intentions in Web search.