Query suggestion is an effective approach to bridge the Intention Gap
between the users’ search intents and queries. Most existing search engines are able
to automatically suggest a list of textual query terms based on users’ current query
input, which can be called Textual Query Suggestion. This chapter introduces a new
query suggestion scheme named Visual Query Suggestion (VQS) which is dedicated
to image search. VQS provides a more effective query interface to help users to
precisely express their search intents by joint text and image suggestions. When a
user submits a textual query, VQS first provides a list of suggestions, each containing
a keyword and a collection of representative images in a dropdown menu. Once the
user selects one of the suggestions, the corresponding keyword will be added to
complement the initial query as the new textual query, while the image collection
will be used as the visual query to further represent the search intent. VQS then
performs image search based on the new textual query using text search techniques,
as well as content-based visual retrieval to refine the search results by using the
corresponding images as query examples.
Keywords: query suggestion, visual query suggestion, keyword suggestion, image suggestion,
joint keyword-image suggestion, search intention, intention gap, ambiguous query,
image search, textual query suggestion
