Search with Synonyms: Problems and Solutions

Search with synonyms is a challenging problem for Web search, as it can easily cause intent drifting. In this paper, we propose a practical solution to this issue, based on co-clicked query analysis, i.e., analyzing queries leading to clicking the same documents. Evaluation results on Web search queries show that synonyms obtained from this approach considerably outperform the thesaurus based synonyms, such as WordNet, in terms of keeping search intent.