Classifying queries submitted to a vertical search engine

Richard Berendsen, Bogomil Kovachev, Edgar Meij, Maarten de Rijke, Wouter Weerkamp

Abstract: We propose and motivate a scheme for classifying queries submitted to a people search engine. We specify a number of features for automatically classifying people queries into the proposed classes and examine the effectiveness of these features. Our main finding is that classification is feasible and that using information from past searches, clickouts and news sources is important.