Short Query Sequences in Misuse Detection

Retrieving documents that are off-topic to an authorized user´s pre-defined area of interest via a search engine is potentially a violation of access rights, commonly referred to as misuse, and is a concern to every private, commercial, and governmental organization. In this preliminary study, we improve previous content-based misuse detection approaches by using a sequence of queries versus only individual user queries to perform our misuse assessment. That is, we reevaluate how off-topic a query is based on the sequence of queries that preceded it. Our empirical results show that by using the information from the queries in a given query window, the degree of false alarm and undetected misuse are both statistically significantly reduced.