Incorporating user search behavior into relevance feedback

In this paper, we present five user experiments on incorporating behavioral information into the relevance feedback process. In particular, we concentrate on ranking terms for query expansion and selecting new terms to add to the user’s query. Our experiments are an attempt to widen the evidence used for relevance feedback from simply the relevant documents to include information on how users are searching. We show that this information can lead to more successful relevance feedback techniques. We also show that the presentation of relevance feedback to the user is important in the success of relevance feedback.