Determining the informational, navigational and transactional intent of web queries

In this paper, we define and present a comprehensive classification of user intent for Web searching. The classification consists of three hierarchical levels of informational, navigational, and transactional intent. After deriving attributes of each, we then developed a software application that automatically classified queries using a Web search engine log of over a million and a half queries submitted by several hundred thousand users. Our findings show that more than 80% of Web queries are informational in nature, with about 10% each being navigational and transactional. In order to validate the accuracy of our algorithm, we manually coded 400 queries and compared the results from this manual classification to the results determined by the automated method. This comparison showed that the automatic classification has an accuracy of 74%. Of the remaining 25% of the queries, the user intent is vague or multi-faceted, pointing to the need for probabilistic classification. We discuss how search engines can use knowledge of user intent to provide more targeted and relevant results in Web searching.

Searching for a feminist voice : film festivals and negotiating the tension between expectation and intent

International Film Festivals play a vital role in shaping filmmakers’ careers. This paper presents some initial findings from a current major research project, highlighting the significance of particular festival programming of emerging female directors from developing nations. Some filmmakers showcased at festivals actively privilege the voices of women in their films as a means of commenting on pressing cultural and political issues. Ironically, other filmmakers do not subscribe to the label of “feminist” or “woman filmmaker”, even if their respective films represent a strongly coded woman’s point of view. Tensions also arise inevitably when scrutinising women filmmakers from developing nations within a first world film festival context. The expectations of the researcher, the festival, film critics and audiences inevitably must negotiate with the original intentions of the filmmaker. This paper explores the significance of women filmmakers in attendance at the Brisbane International Film Festival (2009) and the International Film Festival Rotterdam (2010).

Intent behind payments determines impact on assessment of damages

In Zheng v Cai (2009) 261 ALR 481 the High Court had to determine whether voluntary payments made to the appellant by a third party were to be taken into account when assessing a claim for damages for personal injury.

Classifying the user intent of web queries using k-means clustering

Purpose: Web search engines are frequently used by people to locate information on the Internet. However, not all queries have an informational goal. Instead of information, some people may be looking for specific web sites or may wish to conduct transactions with web services. This paper aims to focus on automatically classifying the different user intents behind web queries. Design/methodology/approach: For the research reported in this paper, 130,000 web search engine queries are categorized as informational, navigational, or transactional using a k-means clustering approach based on a variety of query traits. Findings: The research findings show that more than 75 percent of web queries (clustered into eight classifications) are informational in nature, with about 12 percent each for navigational and transactional. Results also show that web queries fall into eight clusters, six primarily informational, and one each of primarily transactional and navigational. Research limitations/implications: This study provides an important contribution to web search literature because it provides information about the goals of searchers and a method for automatically classifying the intents of the user queries. Automatic classification of user intent can lead to improved web search engines by tailoring results to specific user needs. Practical implications: The paper discusses how web search engines can use automatically classified user queries to provide more targeted and relevant results in web searching by implementing a real time classification method as presented in this research. Originality/value: This research investigates a new application of a method for automatically classifying the intent of user queries. There has been limited research to date on automatically classifying the user intent of web queries, even though the pay-off for web search engines can be quite beneficial. © Emerald Group Publishing Limited.

An ontology-based mining approach for user search intent discovery

Discovering proper search intents is a vi- tal process to return desired results. It is constantly a hot research topic regarding information retrieval in recent years. Existing methods are mainly limited by utilizing context-based mining, query expansion, and user profiling techniques, which are still suffering from the issue of ambiguity in search queries. In this pa- per, we introduce a novel ontology-based approach in terms of a world knowledge base in order to construct personalized ontologies for identifying adequate con- cept levels for matching user search intents. An iter- ative mining algorithm is designed for evaluating po- tential intents level by level until meeting the best re- sult. The propose-to-attempt approach is evaluated in a large volume RCV1 data set, and experimental results indicate a distinct improvement on top precision after compared with baseline models.

Reliability and validity of query intent assessments

In most intent recognition studies, annotations of query intent are created post hoc by external assessors who are not the searchers themselves. It is important for the field to get a better understanding of the quality of this process as an approximation for determining the searcher's actual intent. Some studies have investigated the reliability of the query intent annotation process by measuring the interassessor agreement. However, these studies did not measure the validity of the judgments, that is, to what extent the annotations match the searcher's actual intent. In this study, we asked both the searchers themselves and external assessors to classify queries using the same intent classification scheme. We show that of the seven dimensions in our intent classification scheme, four can reliably be used for query annotation. Of these four, only the annotations on the topic and spatial sensitivity dimension are valid when compared with the searcher's annotations. The difference between the interassessor agreement and the assessor-searcher agreement was significant on all dimensions, showing that the agreement between external assessors is not a good estimator of the validity of the intent classifications. Therefore, we encourage the research community to consider using query intent classifications by the searchers themselves as test data.

Is intent-aware expected reciprocal rank sufficient to evaluate diversity?

In this paper we define two models of users that require diversity in search results; these models are theoretically grounded in the notion of intrinsic and extrinsic diversity. We then examine Intent-Aware Expected Reciprocal Rank (ERR-IA), one of the official measures used to assess diversity in TREC 2011-12, with respect to the proposed user models. By analyzing ranking preferences as expressed by the user models and those estimated by ERR-IA, we investigate whether ERR-IA assesses document rankings according to the requirements of the diversity retrieval task expressed by the two models. Empirical results demonstrate that ERR-IA neglects query-intents coverage by attributing excessive importance to redundant relevant documents. ERR-IA behavior is contrary to the user models that require measures to first assess diversity through the coverage of intents, and then assess the redundancy of relevant intents. Furthermore, diversity should be considered separately from document relevance and the documents positions in the ranking.

Course experiences, satisfaction and career intent of final year pre-registration Australian pharmacy students

Background In Australia, the profession of pharmacy has undergone many changes to adapt to the needs of the community. In recent years, concerns have been raised with evidence emerging of workforce saturation in traditional pharmacy practice sectors. It is not known how current final year pharmacy students’ perceive the different pharmacy career paths in this changing environment. Hence investigating students’ current experiences with their pharmacy course, interaction with the profession and developing an understanding of their career intentions would be an important step, as these students would make up a large proportion of future pharmacy workforce Objective The objective of this study was thus to investigate final year students’ career perspectives and the reasons for choosing pharmacy, satisfaction with this choice of pharmacy as a tertiary course and a possible future career, factors affecting satisfaction and intention of future career paths. Methods A quantitative cross sectional survey of final year students from 3 Australian universities followed by a qualitative semi-structured interview of a convenience sample of final year students from the University of Sydney. Results ‘Interest in health and medicine’ was the most important reason for choosing pharmacy (n=238). The majority of students were ‘somewhat satisfied’ with the choice of pharmacy (35.7%) as a course and possible future career. Positive associations were found between satisfaction and reasons for joining pharmacy such as ‘felt pharmacy is a good profession’ (p=0.003) while negative associations included ‘joined pharmacy as a gateway to medicine or dentistry’ (p=0.001). Quantitate and qualitative results showed the most frequent perception of community pharmacy was ‘changing’ while hospital and pharmaceutical industry was described as ‘competitive’ and ‘research’ respectively. The highest career intention was community followed by hospital pharmacy. Conclusion Complex factors including university experiences are involved in shaping students’ satisfaction and perception of career. This may relate to challenges in the community pharmacy sector, job opportunities in hospital and limited understanding of the pharmaceutical industry. The results offer insight for the profession in terms of entry into various roles and also to pharmacy educators for their roles in shaping curricula and placement experiences that attract future graduates to defined career pathways in pharmacy.

From certificate chasing to genuine engagement : the contribution of curriculum design to students' career intent in a subfield

Many students enter business degrees without a defined career goal beyond working in the business world and adopt a scattergun approach to employability by accumulating certifications accessed through individual subjects. Yet, space and time limitations commonly prevent extended exposure to rewarding and interesting career subfields within main specialisations. This case study draws on student feedback collected over three years exploring students’ career interest following an elective human resource development subject in the final stage of a human resources major. Project-based curriculum provided students with scaffolded learning while undertaking key multiphase human resource development tasks. Subsequently, students reported human resource development career interest and intent, attributed to more realistic appreciation of human resource development’s activities, scope, and values. The paper makes an important contribution illustrating how curriculum design can transform instrumentalism into logically, emotionally, and intuitively based career engagement. Further, human resource development is a study and career area little mentioned in higher education or careers literature.

The Australian curriculum: The arts - intent and big ideas for implementation

For the first time all Australian students having an entitlement to be engaged in all five art forms in Primary school. The Australian Curriculum: The Arts is based on the principle that all young Australians are entitled to engage fully in all the major art forms and to be given a balanced and substantial foundation in the special knowledge and skills base of each. This will have enormous implication on the expectations of what can be achieved in secondary schools, in tertiary institutions and ultimately on the cultural life and heritage for Australia.

Reflecting on Reggio: An evaluation of design intent in an early childhood learning environment

Reggio Emilia is an educational philosophy that encourages teachers, students and their parents to collaborate and actively engage with the environment. This study investigates how the Reggio Emilia design approach was translated architecturally for a kindergarten in an Australian context, and provides insights into the operation of this Reggio kindergarten and the impact that it is now having on the occupants. It evaluates the original architectural design intent of the Reggio Emilia early childhood learning environment against its spatial provision. The relationship that the Reggio Emilia approach facilitates between students and the environment, and the contribution that this approach has on their learning, are also explored. Several key themes emerging from the Reggio values were identified in the literature. These were then used to inform an exploration of the kindergarten spaces and places.. Architects, teachers and a sustainability manager of the kindergarten were interviewed with their experiences constituting the primary data of this study. Using a Grounded Theory methodology, systematic data coding and analysis were then conducted. Themes and concepts that emerged from this process include: differing interpretations of the Reggio Emilia philosophy; motivations for neglect of traditional external structures and play equipment; the impact of education for sustainability; and the positive effects that Reggio Emilia is having on the rest of the institution’s development.

Criminal intent

The High Court recently heard submissions of counsel in Zaburoni v The Queen. This case concerns an appeal against conviction for transmitting a serious disease with intent under section 317(b) and (e) of the Queensland Criminal Code. It raises important issues about the meaning of intent and how intent can be proven in Queensland criminal offences. Since intent is an element of so many of the more serious crimes, it is surprising to see that the courts, both in England and Australia, continue to grapple with how best to define it. In murder, for example, the accused is potentially going to be locked up for a very long time, so it is essential that the courts and juries are very clear on what intent actually means, so that they can be confident in correctly finding that it was present on the facts of the case.

Intent Based Clustering of Search Engine Query Log

The keyword based search technique suffers from the problem of synonymic and polysemic queries. Current approaches address only theproblem of synonymic queries in which different queries might have the same information requirement. But the problem of polysemic queries,i.e., same query having different intentions, still remains unaddressed. In this paper, we propose the notion of intent clusters, the members of which will have the same intention. We develop a clustering algorithm that uses the user session information in query logs in addition to query URL entries to identify cluster of queries having the same intention. The proposed approach has been studied through case examples from the actual log data from AOL, and the clustering algorithm is shown to be successful in discerning the user intentions.