How can a search engine automatically provide the best and most appropriate title for a result URL (link-title) so that users will be persuaded to click on the URL? We consider the problem of automatically generating link-titles for URLs and propose a general statistical framework for solving this problem. The framework is based on using information from a diverse collection of sources, each of which can be thought of as contributing one or more candidate link-titles for the URL. It can also incorporate the context in which the link-title will be used, along with constraints on its length. Our framework is applicable to several scenarios: obtaining succinct titles for displaying quicklinks, obtaining titles for URLs that lack a good title, constructing succinct sitemaps, etc. Extensive experiments show that our method is very effective, producing results that are at least 20% better than non-trivial baselines.
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