Patent ID: 8407214

Claim:
A method of constructing a classifier, comprising: receiving a click graph correlating queries to items identified by the queries, wherein the click graph contains initial labeled queries that have been labeled with respect to predetermined query-intent classes that represent whether or not corresponding queries are associated with particular intents of users to search for particular information from particular categories of information that a user wishes to perform a search in, and unlabeled queries that have not been labeled with respect to the predetermined query-intent classes, wherein the click graph comprises query nodes representing respective queries that are assigned a positive query-intent class when a query node corresponds to a positive query-intent class, or a negative query intent class when the query node does not correspond to a query-intent class, uniform resource locator (URL) nodes representing respective URLs, and edges between at least some of the query nodes and URL nodes when a user has navigated to a URL node for a given query; using the click graph to label at least some of the unlabeled queries with respect to the predetermined query-intent classes by inferring the query-intent classes of the unlabeled nodes from class memberships of the labeled query nodes based on similarity of click patterns from query nodes to correlated URL nodes; and using queries in the click graph that have been labeled with respect to the predetermined query-intent classes as training data to train the classifier.