Studying Databases of Intentions: Do Search Query Logs Capture Knowledge about Common Human Goals?

Access to knowledge about common human goals has been found critical for realizing the vision of intelligent agents acting upon user intent on the web. Yet, the acquisition of knowledge about common human goals represents a major challenge In a departure from existing approaches, this paper investigates a novel resource for knowledge acquisition: The utilization of search query logs for this task. By relating goals contained in search query logs with goals contained in existing commonsense knowledge bases such as ConceptNet, we aim to shed light on the usefulness of search query logs for capturing knowledge about common human goals. The main contribution of this paper consists of an empirical study comparing common human goals contained in two large search query logs (AOL and Microsoft Research) with goals contained in the commonsense knowledge base ConceptNet. The paper sketches ways how goals from search query logs could be used to address the goal acquisition and goal coverage problem related to commonsense knowledge bases.