Characterizing Robotic and Organic Query in SPARQL Search Sessions

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Abstract

SPARQL, as one of the most powerful query languages over knowledge graphs, has gained significant popularity in recent years. A large amount of SPARQL query logs have become available and provide new research opportunities to discover user interests, understand query intentions, and model search behaviors. However, a significant portion of the queries to SPARQL endpoints on the Web are robotic queries that are generated by automated scripts. Detecting and separating these robotic queries from those organic ones issued by human users is crucial to deep usage analysis of knowledge graphs. In light of this, in this paper, we propose a novel method to identify SPARQL queries based on session-level query features. Specifically, we define and partition SPARQL queries into different sessions. Then, we design an algorithm to detect loop patterns, which is an important characteristic of robotic queries, in a given query session. Finally, we employ a pipeline method that leverages loop pattern features and query request frequency to distinguish the robotic and organic SPARQL queries. Differing from other machine learning based methods, the proposed method can identify the query types accurately without labelled data. We conduct extensive experiments on six real-world SPARQL query log datasets. The results demonstrate that our approach can distinguish robotic and organic queries effectively and only need $7.63 \times 10^{-4}$ seconds on average to process a query.