Semantic composition of distributed representations for query subtopic mining

Inferring query intent is significant in information retrieval tasks. Query subtopic mining aims to find possible subtopics for a given query to represent potential intents. Subtopic mining is challenging due to the nature of short queries. Learning distributed representations or sequences of words has been developed recently and quickly, making great impacts on many fields. It is still not clear whether distributed representations are effective in alleviating the challenges of query subtopic mining. In this paper, we exploit and compare the main semantic composition of distributed representations for query subtopic mining. Specifically, we focus on two types of distributed representations: paragraph vector which represents word sequences with an arbitrary length directly, and word vector composition. We thoroughly investigate the impacts of semantic composition strategies and the types of data for learning distributed representations. Experiments were conducted on a public dataset offered by the National Institute of Informatics Testbeds and Community for Information Access Research. The empirical results show that distributed semantic representations can achieve outstanding performance for query subtopic mining, compared with traditional semantic representations. More insights are reported as well.