by Sergio Duarte Torres, Djoerd Hiemstra, Ingmar Weber, Pavel Serdyukov. 

Children represent an increasing part of web users. One of the key problems that hamper their search experience is their limited vocabulary, their difficulty to use the right keywords, and the inappropriateness of general-purpose query suggestions. In this journal paper, we expanded the biased random walk introduced in our paper Query recommendation for Children by combining the score of the random walk with topical and language modeling features to emphasize even more the child-related aspects of the query suggestions.

We evaluate our methods using a large query log sample of queries submitted by children (from the Yahoo! Search logs). We show that our method outperforms by a large margin the query suggestions of modern search engines and state-of-the art query suggestions based on random walks.

Published at JASIST, February 2014. Read the paper.