GUIDING STUDENTS TO ANSWERS: Query Recommendation

This paper reports on a guided navigation system built on the textbook search engine
developed at Anadolu University to support distance education students. The search engine
uses Turkish Language specific language processing modules to enable searches over
course material presented in Open Education Faculty textbooks. We implemented a guided
navigation engine by using query log mining to our application. It makes use of previous
users‘ sessions to help students find information they are looking for by using fewer
queries. We used item-based similarity to do query recommendation.
This paper describes the search application, query expansion and evaluation of the system
over existing query logs. We show that our system suggested relevant queries with a
success rate of 85%.