article

Characteristics of character usage in Chinese Web searching

Authors:

Christopher C. YangAuthors Info & Claims

Information Processing and Management: an International Journal, Volume 45, Issue 1

Pages 115 - 130

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ipm.2008.06.005

Published: 01 January 2009 Publication History

Abstract

The use of non-English Web search engines has been prevalent. Given the popularity of Chinese Web searching and the unique characteristics of Chinese language, it is imperative to conduct studies with focuses on the analysis of Chinese Web search queries. In this paper, we report our research on the character usage of Chinese search logs from a Web search engine in Hong Kong. By examining the distribution of search query terms, we found that users tended to use more diversified terms and that the usage of characters in search queries was quite different from the character usage of general online information in Chinese. After studying the Zipf distribution of n-grams with different values of n, we found that the curve of unigram is the most curved one of all while the bigram curve follows the Zipf distribution best, and that the curves of n-grams with larger n (n=3-6) had similar structures with @b-values in the range of 0.66-0.86. The distribution of combined n-grams was also studied. All the analyses are performed on the data both before and after the removal of function terms and incomplete terms and similar findings are revealed. We believe the findings from this study have provided some insights into further research in non-English Web searching and will assist in the design of more effective Chinese Web search engines.

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Cited By

Zhou Y(2021)Meaningfulness and Unit of Zipf’s Law: Evidence from Danmu CommentsChinese Computational Linguistics10.1007/978-3-030-84186-7_16(239-253)Online publication date: 13-Aug-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-030-84186-7_16
(2018)Cross-lingual analysis of English and Chinese web searchInternational Journal of Web and Grid Services10.5555/3292946.329294914:4(376-399)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3292946.3292949
Fu HNordlie RPharo NFreund LLarsen BRussel D(2017)Query Reformulation Patterns of Mixed Language Queries in Different Search IntentsProceedings of the 2017 Conference on Conference Human Information Interaction and Retrieval10.1145/3020165.3022126(249-252)Online publication date: 7-Mar-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3020165.3022126
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Characteristics of character usage in Chinese Web searching
1. Computing methodologies
  1. Artificial intelligence
    1. Natural language processing
2. Information systems
  1. Information retrieval
    1. Evaluation of retrieval results
  2. Information systems applications
    1. Data mining

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cover image Information Processing and Management: an International Journal

Information Processing and Management: an International Journal Volume 45, Issue 1

January, 2009

175 pages

ISSN:0306-4573

Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © Elsevier Ltd © 2008.

Publisher

Pergamon Press, Inc.

United States

Publication History

Published: 01 January 2009

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Cited By

Zhou Y(2021)Meaningfulness and Unit of Zipf’s Law: Evidence from Danmu CommentsChinese Computational Linguistics10.1007/978-3-030-84186-7_16(239-253)Online publication date: 13-Aug-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-030-84186-7_16
(2018)Cross-lingual analysis of English and Chinese web searchInternational Journal of Web and Grid Services10.5555/3292946.329294914:4(376-399)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3292946.3292949
Fu HNordlie RPharo NFreund LLarsen BRussel D(2017)Query Reformulation Patterns of Mixed Language Queries in Different Search IntentsProceedings of the 2017 Conference on Conference Human Information Interaction and Retrieval10.1145/3020165.3022126(249-252)Online publication date: 7-Mar-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3020165.3022126
Fu H(2016)Analysis of chinese-english mixed language query reformulation strategies and patterns during web searchingProceedings of the 79th ASIS&T Annual Meeting: Creating Knowledge, Enhancing Lives through Information & Technology10.5555/3017447.3017533(1-5)Online publication date: 14-Oct-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3017447.3017533
Petersen CSimonsen JLioma C(2016)Power Law Distributions in Information RetrievalACM Transactions on Information Systems10.1145/281681534:2(1-37)Online publication date: 16-Feb-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2816815
Fu H(2016)Analysis of chinese‐english mixed language query reformulation strategies and patterns during web searchingProceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology10.1002/pra2.2016.1450530108653:1(1-5)Online publication date: 27-Dec-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1002/pra2.2016.14505301086
Whiting SJose JChung CBroder AShim KSuel T(2014)Recent and robust query auto-completionProceedings of the 23rd international conference on World wide web10.1145/2566486.2568009(971-982)Online publication date: 7-Apr-2014
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2566486.2568009
Gencosman BOzmutlu HOzmutlu S(2014)Character n-gram application for automatic new topic identificationInformation Processing and Management: an International Journal10.1016/j.ipm.2014.06.00550:6(821-856)Online publication date: 1-Nov-2014
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.ipm.2014.06.005
Chen XGuo CChau MZhou W(2013)Character usage in Chinese short message service SMSInternational Journal of Mobile Communications10.1504/IJMC.2013.05695411:5(429-445)Online publication date: 1-Oct-2013
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1504/IJMC.2013.056954
Tong JWang GStones DSun SLiu XZhang FHe QIyengar ANejdl WPei JRastogi R(2013)Exploiting query term correlation for list caching in web search enginesProceedings of the 22nd ACM international conference on Information & Knowledge Management10.1145/2505515.2507870(1817-1820)Online publication date: 27-Oct-2013
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2505515.2507870
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