Improving passage ranking with user behavior information

Abstract

User behavior information has proved valuable for inferring document relevance, but its role in deducing relevance at the passage/section level is not well explored. In this paper, we study how user behavior information implies section relevance, and use this information to improve section ranking. More specifically, we focus on four types of user search behavior that occur while browsing a document -dwell time, highlighting, copying and clicks at the section level. Experimental results based on a commercial query log show that user behavior information can significantly improve section ranking. While section-level click information is a very powerful signal of relevance, it depends on an interface supporting section-level links. We find comparable levels of gain using other behavior information that does not depend upon such an interface.