36544447
What Are People Looking for in Your Web Page?
Web server log analyses usually analyze the pattern of the access. We believe that it is also very important to understand the goal of the access. In this paper, we propose to combine the log analysis with content analysis to identify information goals on individual accessed pages. We analyze the web server log to extract information goals on entry pages from anchor texts and query terms, and propagate them along users’ access paths to other linked pages. The experiment shows that our approach could find popular terms on web pages, temporal changes in these terms could reflect users’ interest shifts, and unexpected terms could sometimes indicate a design problem.
19735283
A generalized site ranking model for Web IR
Normally, the unit for a ranking model in a Web IR system is a Web page, which is, sometimes, just an information fragment. A larger unit considering the linkage information may be desired to reduce the cognitive overload for users to identify the complete information from the interconnected Web. We propose a ranking model to measure the relevance of the whole Web site. We take some illustrations to show the idea and provide evidences to indicate its effectiveness.
21949746
An Improved Usage-Based Ranking
A good ranking is critical to gain a positive searching experience. With usage data collected from past searching activities, it could be improved from current approaches which are largely based on text or link information. In this paper, we proposed a usage-based ranking algorithm. Basically, it calculates the rank score on time duration considering the propagated effect, which is an improvement on the simple selection frequency determined method. Besides, it also has some heuristics to further improve the accuracy of top-positioned results.
13552447
Reverse mapping of referral links from storage hierarchy for Web documents
Due to the lack of back-pointers, information about the referral parent(s) of a given Web page is not usually available to Web surfers. This significantly reduces the effectiveness of Web surfing and information discovery. We propose a mechanism to locate the referral parent(s) for a given fragment of a Web document (in terms of an URL address) from the client side. The basic idea is to explore the hierarchical hyperlink structure of a Web document fragment from its storage path directory information that is embedded in its URL. Two mechanisms were proposed: exhaustibility first search (EFS) and generalization first search (GFS). Results showed that through direct mapping of the storage hierarchy path to the URL address and then performing reverse tracing along the hyperlink structure, the chance of discovering a referral parent ranged from 41% to 51%. Compared to EFS, GFS was found to reduce the average search space from 26 pages to 4 pages.
209398610
Beyond the traditional query operators.
9546816
A Framework of HTML Content Selection and Adaptive Delivery
In this paper, we propose a content selection and adaptive delivery framework to adapt content delivery to different client capabilities and preferences. The framework provides language support to content publishers with XML-based markup language to describe the content and control the transformation and delivery process. Automatic content classification and selective delivery based on match between content class and user capability or preference are also implemented. Thus, when content descriptions from server are not available, adaptive content delivery is still possible. The framework is generic and scalable. Performance studies on content classification and selection model show that it is effective in saving network resources and improving clients’ access experiences.
2829824
A Probabilistic Approach for Optimizing Spectral Clustering
Spectral clustering enjoys its success in both data clustering and semi-supervised learning. But, most spectral clustering algorithms cannot handle multi-class clustering problems directly. Additional strategies are needed to extend spectral clustering algorithms to multi-class clustering problems. Furthermore, most spectral clustering algorithms employ hard cluster membership, which is likely to be trapped by the local optimum. In this paper, we present a new spectral clustering algorithm, named "Soft Cut". It improves the normalized cut algorithm by introducing soft membership, and can be efficiently computed using a bound optimization algorithm. Our experiments with a variety of datasets have shown the promising performance of the proposed clustering algorithm.
4990172
Structure search and stability enhancement of Bayesian networks
Learning Bayesian network structure from large-scale data sets, without any expert-specified ordering of variables, remains a difficult problem. We propose systematic improvements to automatically learn Bayesian network structure from data. (1) We propose a linear parent search method to generate candidate graph. (2) We propose a comprehensive approach to eliminate cycles using minimal likelihood loss, a short cycle first heuristic, and a cut-edge repairing. (3) We propose structure perturbation to assess the stability of the network and a stability-improvement method to refine the network structure. The algorithms are easy to implement and efficient for large networks. Experimental results on two data sets show that our new approach outperforms existing methods.
270633
Web document clustering using hyperlink structures
WEB DOCUMENT CLUSTERING USING HYPERLINK STRUCTURES XIAOFENG HE y , HONGYUAN ZHA , CHRIS H.Q. DING y AND HORST D. SIMON y Abstract. With the exponential growth of information on the World Wide Web, there is great demand for developing e cient and e ective methods for organizing and retrieving the information available. Document clustering plays an important role in information retrieval and taxonomy man- agement for the World Wide Web and remains an interesting and challenging problem in the eld of web computing. In this paper we consider document clustering methods exploring textual infor- mation, hyperlink structure and co-citation relations. In particular, we apply the normalized-cut clustering method developed in computer vision to the task of hyperdocument clustering. We also explore some theoretical connections of the normalized-cut method to K-means method. We then experiment with normalized-cut method in the context of clustering query result sets for web search engines. Keywords. World Wide Web, graph partitioning, cheeger constant, clustering method, K-means method, normalized cut method, eigenvalue decomposition, power method. 1. Introduction. Currently the World Wide Web contains billions of documents and it is still growing rapidly. Finding the relevant documents to satisfy a user's infor- mation need is a very important and challenging task. Many commercial search en- gines have been developed and used by millions of people all over the world. However, the relevancy of documents returned in search engine result sets is still lacking, and further research and development is needed to really make search engines a ubiquitous information-seeking tool. The World Wide Web has a rich structure: it contains both textual web documents and the hyperlinks that connect them. The web documents and hyperlinks between them form a directed graph in which the web documents can be viewed as vertices and the hyperlinks as directed edges. Algorithms have been de- veloped utilizing this directed graph to extract information contained in a collection of hyperlinked web documents. Kleinberg proposed HITS algorithm based purely on hyperlink information to retrieve the most relevant information: authority and hub documents for a user query 20]. However, if the hypertext collection consists of sev- eral topics, authority and hub documents may only cover the most popular topics and leave out the less popular ones. One way to remedy this situation is to rst partition the hypertext collection into topical groups, and present the search results as a list of topics to the user. This leads to the need to cluster web documents based on both the textual and hyperlink information. There exists a large literature on clustering methods and algorithms 13, 19]. Gen- erally speaking, the purpose of cluster analysis is to organize the data into meaningful groups: the data objects in the same group are highly similar and those in di erent groups are dissimilar. Judging the e ectiveness of a clustering algorithm is di cult and usually application-dependent. In this paper, we apply a similarity-based cluster- ing method to the problem of clustering web documents. It utilizes a graph-theoretic criterion called normalized cut which has its root in the study of graph isoperimetric Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The Pennsylvania State University, Uni- versity Park, PA 16802, f xhe,zha g @cse.psu.edu . This work was supported in part by NSF grant CCR-9901986. y NERSC Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, f xfhe,chqding,hdsimon g @lbl.gov . Supported by Department of Energy through an LBL LDRD fund.
13840611
Dynamic cluster formation using level set methods
Density-based clustering has the advantages for: 1) allowing arbitrary shape of cluster and 2) not requiring the number of clusters as input. However, when clusters touch each other, both the cluster centers and cluster boundaries (as the peaks and valleys of the density distribution) become fuzzy and difficult to determine. We introduce the notion of cluster intensity function (CIF) which captures the important characteristics of clusters. When clusters are well-separated, CIFs are similar to density functions. But, when clusters become closed to each other, CIFs still clearly reveal cluster centers, cluster boundaries, and degree of membership of each data point to the cluster that it belongs. Clustering through bump hunting and valley seeking based on these functions are more robust than that based on density functions obtained by kernel density estimation, which are often oscillatory or oversmoothed. These problems of kernel density estimation are resolved using level set methods and related techniques. Comparisons with two existing density-based methods, valley seeking and DBSCAN, are presented which illustrate the advantages of our approach.
15790257
K-nearest-neighbor consistency in data clustering: incorporating local information into global optimization
Nearest neighbor consistency is a central concept in statistical pattern recognition, especially the kNN classification methods and its strong theoretical foundation. In this paper, we extend this concept to data clustering, requiring that for any data point in a cluster, its k-nearest neighbors and mutual nearest neighbors should also be in the same cluster. We study properties of the cluster k-nearest neighbor consistency and propose kNN and kMN consistency enforcing and improving algorithms. Extensive experiments on internet newsgroup datasets using the K-means clustering algorithm with kNN consistency enhancement show that kNN / kMN consistency can be improved significantly (about 100% for 1MN and 1NN consistencies) while the clustering accuracy is improved simultaneously. This indicates the local consistency information helps the global cluster objective function optimization.