Localized query prediction (LQP) is the task of estimating web query trends for a specific location. This
problem subsumes many interesting personalized web applications such as personalization for buzz query
detection, for query expansion, and for query recommendation. These personalized applications can greatly
enhance user interaction with web search engines by providing more customized information discovered
from user input (i.e., queries), but the LQP task has rarely been investigated in the literature. Although
exist abundant work on estimating global web search trends does exist, it often encounters the big challenge
of data sparsity when personalization comes into play.
In this article, we tackle the LQP task by proposing a series of collaborative language models (CLMs).
CLMs alleviate the data sparsity issue by collaboratively collecting queries and trend information from the
other locations. The traditional statistical language models assume a fixed background language model,
which loses the taste of personalization. In contrast, CLMs are personalized language models with flexible
background language models customized to various locations. The most sophisticated CLM enables the
collaboration to adapt to specific query topics, which further advances the personalization level. An extensive
set of experiments have been conducted on a large-scale web query log to demonstrate the effectiveness of
the proposed models.