Automatically Mining Question Reformulation Patterns from Search Log Data.

Natural language questions have become popular in web search. However, various questions can be formulated to convey the same information need, which poses a great challenge to search systems. In this paper, we automatically mined 5w1h question reformulation patterns from large scale search log data. The question reformulations generated from these patterns are further incorporated into the retrieval model. Experiments show that using question reformulation patterns can significantly improve the search performance of natural language questions.