Deep Learning for Search

Chapter 3. From plain retrieval to text generation

This chapter covers

• Expanding queries
• Using search logs to build training data
• Understanding recurrent neural networks
• Generating alternative queries with RNNs

In the early days of the internet and search engines (late 1990s), people only searched for keywords. Users might have typed “movie zemeckis future” to find information about the movie Back to the Future, directed by Robert Zemeckis. Although search engines have evolved, and today we can type queries using natural language, many users still rely on keywords when searching. For these users, it would be advantageous if the search engine could generate a proper query based on the keywords they type: for example, taking “movie Zemeckis ...