A Taxonomy of Query Auto-Completion Modes
Unni Krishnan
School of Computing and Information Systems,
The University of Melbourne,
Victoria 3010, Australia.
Alistair Moffat
School of Computing and Information Systems,
The University of Melbourne,
Victoria 3010, Australia.
Justin Zobel
School of Computing and Information Systems,
The University of Melbourne,
Victoria 3010, Australia.
Status
Proc. 22nd Australasian Document Computing Symp., Brisbane, Australia,
December 2017, pages 6.1-6.8.
Abstract
Query auto completion mechanisms assist users to formulate search
requests by suggesting possible queries corresponding to incomplete
text they have typed.
Keystroke by keystroke, these mechanisms proceed by finding matching
strings from resources such as logs that have captured the behavior
of previous users; they might also be informed by key phrases
extracted from indexed documents, including, for example, anchor-text
strings.
Here we explore the range of ways, or modes, in which strings might
be thought of as ``matching'' a partially typed query, and hence
develop a taxonomy of possible approaches, each requiring different
implementation structures and algorithms.
Past work in the field has typically focused on only one or another
of the modes, creating a lack of clarity as to exactly what challenge
is being addressed.
We use our taxonomy to survey options for auto completion and provide
preliminary measurements in regard to their computational cost, using
a range of public implementations.
Full text
https://doi.org/10.1145/3166072.3166081