IRIT at CLEF 2015: A product search model for head queries

Abstract

We describe in this paper our participation in the product search task of LL4IR CLEF 2015 Lab. This task aims to evaluate, with living labs protective point of view, the retrieval effectiveness over e-commerce search engines. During the online shopping process, users would search for interesting products and quickly access those that fit with their needs among a long tail of similar or closely related products. Our contribution addresses head queries that are frequently submitted on e-commerce Web sites. Head queries usually target featured products with several variations, accessories, and complementary products. We propose a probabilistic model for product search based on the intuition that descriptive fields and the category might fit with the query. Finaly, we present results obtained during the second round of the product search task.