In the absence of explicit queries, an alternative is to try to infer users' interests from implicit feedback signals, such as clickstreams or eye tracking. The interests, formulated as an implicit query, can then be used in further searches. We formulate this task as a probabilistic model, which can be interpreted as a kind of transfer or meta-learning. The probabilistic model is demonstrated to outperform an earlier kernel-based method in a small-scale information retrieval task.

This work was supported in part by the PASCAL2 Network of Excellence of the European Community.