ORCAS-I: Queries Annotated with Intent Using Weak Supervision

Abstract

User intent classification is an important task in information retrieval. In this work, we introduce a revised taxonomy of user intent. We take the widely used differentiation between navigational, transactional and informational queries as a starting point, and identify three different sub-classes for the informational queries: instrumental, factual and abstain. The resulting classification of user queries is more fine-grained, reaches a high level of consistency between annotators, and can serve as the basis for an effective automatic classification process. The newly introduced categories help distinguish between types of queries that a retrieval system could act upon, for example by prioritizing different types of results in the ranking. We have used a weak supervision approach based on Snorkel to annotate the ORCAS dataset according to our new user intent taxonomy, utilising established heuristics and keywords to construct rules for the prediction of the intent category. We then present a series of experiments with a variety of machine learning models, using the labels from the weak supervision stage as training data, but find that the results produced by Snorkel are not outperformed by these competing approaches and can be considered state-of-the-art. The advantage of a rule-based approach like Snorkel's is its efficient deployment in an actual system, where intent classification would be executed for every query issued. The resource released with this paper is the ORCAS-I dataset: a labelled version of the ORCAS click-based dataset of Web queries, which provides 18 million connections to 10 million distinct queries. We anticipate the usage of this resource in a scenario where the retrieval system would change its internal workings and search user interface to match the type of information request. For example, a navigational query could trigger just a short result list; and, for instrumental intent the system could rank tutorials and instructions higher than for other types of queries.