Guiding students to answers: Query recommendation

Abstract

This paper reports on a guided navigation system built on the textbook search engine developed at Anadolu University to support distance education students. The search engine uses Turkish Language specific language processing modules to enable searches over course material presented in Open Education Faculty textbooks. We implemented a guided navigation engine by using query log mining to our application. It makes use of previous users' sessions to help students find information they are looking for by using fewer queries. We used item-based similarity to do query recommendation. This paper describes the search application, query expansion and evaluation of the system over existing query logs. We show that our system suggested relevant queries with a success rate of 85%.