Taxonomy Pruning for Query Classification

When providing a search interface (F4), you can improve precision significantly by classifying a user’s query, assuming you are able to classify your content.

If you have a category taxonomy and labeled queries, you can train a classifier in order to dynamically assign a category to a query. A benefit of taxonomic hierarchy is that, while a labeled query may be labeled with a leaf node of the taxonomy, you can prune, i.e. “roll up”, the taxonomy to ensure sufficient signal for training. This helps to maintain recall when filtering query results by the query’s classification.