2 INFORMATION NEED PREDICTIONNEED A MODEL TO PREDICT THE INFORMATION...

4.2 Information Need Prediction

need a model to predict the information need part

based on the query question in order to recommend

After estimating the statistical translation probabili-

questions based on the similarity of their informa-

ties, we treat the information need prediction as the

tion needs. Another reason is that information need

process of ranking words by p(w|Q), the probability

prediction plays a crucial part not only in Question

of generating word w from question Q:

Answering but also in information retrieval (Liu et

P

tr

(w|t)P(t|Q) + (1 − λ)P (w|C)

P (w|Q) = λ X

al., 2008). In this paper we propose an information

t∈Q

need prediction method based on a statistical ma-

chine translation model.

The word-to-word translation probability

P

tr

(w|t) is the probability of word w is translated