Neural network applications for automatic new topic identification of FAST and Excite search engine transaction logs

Content analysis of search engine user queries is an important task, since successful exploitation of the content of queries can result in the design of efficient information retrieval algorithms for more efficient search engines. Identification of topic changes within a user search session is a key issue in content analysis of search engine user queries. This study proposes an artificial neural network application in the area of search engine research to automatically identify topic changes in a user session by using statistical characteristics of queries, such as time intervals and query reformulation patterns. Sample data logs from the FAST and Excite search engines are selected to train the neural network and then the neural network is used to identify topic changes in the data log. As a result, almost all the performance measures yielded favourable results.