The Role of Word-Eye-Fixations for Query Term Prediction

Abstract: Throughout the search process, the user's gaze on inspected SERPs and websites can reveal his or her search interests. Gaze behavior can be captured with eye tracking and described with word-eye-fixations. Word-eye-fixations contain the user's accumulated gaze fixation duration on each individual word of a web page. In this work, we analyze the role of word-eye-fixations for predicting query terms. We investigate the relationship between a range of in-session features, in particular, gaze data, with the query terms and train models for predicting query terms. We use a dataset of 50 search sessions obtained through a lab study in the social sciences domain. Using established machine learning models, we can predict query terms with comparably high accuracy, even with only little training data. Feature analysis shows that the categories Fixation, Query Relevance and Session Topic contain the most effective features for our task.