June 3, 2010 – Earlier this year we learned about a novel method for building taxonomies. We located on Microsoft Research’s Web site the complete paper, “Building Taxonomy of Web Search Intents for Name Entity Queries.” Like most technical papers, there is a hefty dose of math, but in this paper the authors have provided some possible hints about what Microsoft may make available in its enterprise and consumer search systems. One example is Microsoft’s focus on “intent phrases”. The idea is that a system can ascertain the reason the user is seeking information. The authors also employed an interesting method for validating the performance of their system. Microsoft Research used human judges via Mechanical Turk. The point of this check was that the Microsoft method can build trees of phrases that capture the relationships between important search intents.
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