Improved Algorithms for Topic Distillation in a Hyperlinked Environment

This paper addresses the problem of topic distillation on the World Wide Web, namely, given a typical user query to find quality documents related to the query topic. Connectivity analysis has been shown to be useful in identifying high quality pages within a topic specific graph of hyperlinked documents. The essence of our approach is to augment a previous connectivity analysis based algorithm with content analysis. We identify three problems with the existing approach and devise algorithms to tackle them. The results of a user evaluation are reported that show an improvement of precision at 10 documents by at least 45% over pure connectivity analysis.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1998
• Where: SIGIR
• Authors: Krishna Bharat, Monika Rauch Henzinger
• Keywords: Connectivity Analysis, Information Management, SIGIR 1998, Topic Specific Graph, Typical User Query