Correlation analysis between social network content and query intention

Social network contains large amounts of user interests and preferences which may therefore help improve techniques for information retrieval, such as user profile construction and query expansion. By the manual annotation, we find that query intention normally consists of several retrieval behaviors and a certain number of social network behaviors. This paper argues that a user's query intention has a strong correlation with the corresponding social network contents, which focuses on two aspects. First, we analyze the proportion of social network websites in users' retrieval records, and evaluate the degree of relationship between information retrieval behavior and social network behavior from a statistic perspective. Second, a similarity between the two components of query intention, retrieval content and social network content, is calculated employing a topic model to measure the correlation of them from a semantic perspective. The evaluation on a ground-truth data of retrieval records indicates that a long-term retrieval procedure is usually accompanied with accessing social network websites. More importantly, the experimental results show that more than 54% of the content from social network has a strong correlation with users' query intention.