Enhancing web search with entity intent

Na Dai, Xiaoguang Qi, Brian D. Davison

Abstract: Web entities, such as documents and hyperlinks, are created for different purposes, or intents. Existing intent-based retrieval methods largely focus on information seekers' intent expressed by queries, ignoring the other side of the problem: web content creators' intent. We argue that understanding why the content was created is also important. In this work, we propose to classify such intents into two broad categories: "navigational" and "informational". Then we incorporate such intents into traditional retrieval models, and show their effect on ranking performance.