Investigating queries and search failures in academic search

We find that using entities helps to surface more relevant query suggestions in the face of query sparsity. We also find that query suggestions should be conditioned on the type of session in which they are offered to be more effective. After casting the session classification problem as a multi-label classification problem, we generate session-conditional query suggestions based on predicted session type. We find that this session-conditional method leads to significant improvements over a generic query suggestion method. Personalization yields very little further improvements over session-conditional query suggestions.