Query understanding is the process of inferring the intent of a search engine user by extracting semantic meaning from the searcher’s keywords.
[1] Query understanding methods generally take place before the search engine retrieves and ranks results.
Traditional approaches, such as the bag-of-words model, treat individual words as independent units, which can limit interpretative accuracy.
For languages like Chinese, where words are not separated by spaces, segmentation is essential, as individual characters often lack standalone meaning.
Entity recognition systems typically use grammar-based linguistic techniques or statistical machine learning models.