A real-time eye tracking based query expansion approach via latent topic modeling

Formulating and reformulating reliable textual queries have been recognized as a challenging task in Information Retrieval (IR), even for experienced users. Most existing query expansion methods, especially those based on implicit relevance feedback, utilize the user's historical interaction data, such as clicks, scrolling and viewing time on documents, to derive a refined query model. It is further expected that the user's search experience would be largely improved if we could dig out user's latent query intention, in real-time, by capturing the user's current interaction at the term level directly. In this paper, we propose a real-time eye tracking based query expansion method, which is able to: (1) automatically capture the terms that the user is viewing by utilizing eye tracking techniques; (2) derive the user's latent intent based on the eye tracking terms and by using the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) approach. A systematic user study has been carried out and the experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed methods.