Inferring query intent is significant in information retrieval tasks. Query subtopic mining aims to find possible sub-
topics for a given query to represent potential intents. Subtopic mining is challenging due to the nature of short queries. Learning
distributed representations or sequences of words has been developed recently and quickly, making great impacts on many fields.
It is still not clear whether distributed representations are effective in alleviating the challenges of query subtopic mining. In this
paper, we exploit and compare the main semantic composition of distributed representations for query subtopic mining. Specif-
ically, we focus on two types of distributed representations: paragraph vector which represents word sequences with an arbitrary
length directly, and word vector composition. We thoroughly investigate the impacts of semantic composition strategies and the
types of data for learning distributed representations. Experiments were conducted on a public dataset offered by the National
Institute of Informatics Testbeds and Community for Information Access Research. The empirical results show that distributed
semantic representations can achieve outstanding performance for query subtopic mining, compared with traditional semantic
representations. More insights are reported as well.

关键词： Subtopic mining,  Query intent,  Distributed representation,  Semantic composition