Guiding Web Search by Third-Party Viewpoints: Browsing Retrieval Results by Referential Contexts in Web

摘要

In a typical web search session, a user starts with partially defined queries which are refined as the user finds out more about the search domain. Conventional approaches emphasize narrowing the search, but pay little attention to outlining the scope of search, in which the user aggregates the retrieval results in a bottom-up approach. Although the standard technique is to cluster the page contents, this becomes difficult as the results contain a wide spectrum of page contents due to the fragmentary queries. In this paper, we propose an approach for outlining the scope of search based on "third-party viewpoints" on retrieval results. A web page is referred to by other web pages in various contexts through hyperlinks. The proposed method extracts an appropriate range of web contents surrounding the page as the referential context. By clustering similar contexts, web page "aspects" are discovered as generalized descriptions of the page references. Visualizing correlations between the page contents and the aspects helps a user find coherent semantic units of the retrieval results, which are classified into acknowledged pages, versatile pages, and alternative pages. We explain the details of the proposed method and a prototype implementation.