Exploring URL hit priors for Web search

Ruihua Song, Guomao Xin, Shuming Shi, Ji-Rong Wen, Wei-Ying Ma

Research output: Chapters, Conference Papers, Creative and Literary WorksRGC 32 - Refereed conference paper (with host publication)peer-review

Abstract

URL usually contains meaningful information for measuring the relevance of a Web page to a query in Web search. Some existing works utilize URL depth priors (i.e. the probability of being a good page given the length and depth of a URL) for improving some types of Web search tasks. This paper suggests the use of the location of query terms occur in a URL for measuring how well a web page is matched with a user's information need in web search. First, we define and estimate URL hit types, i.e. the priori probability of being a good answer given the type of query term hits in the URL. The main advantage of URL hit priors (over depth priors) is that it can achieve stable improvement for both informational and navigational queries. Second, an obstacle of exploiting such priors is that shortening and concatenation are frequently used in a URL. Our investigation shows that only 30% URL hits are recognized by an ordinary word breaking approach. Thus we combine three methods to improve matching. Finally, the priors are integrated into the probabilistic model for enhancing web document retrieval. Our experiments were conducted using 7 query sets of TREC2002, TREC2003 and TREC2004, and show that the proposed approach is stable and improve retrieval effectiveness by 4%-11% for navigational queries and 10% for informational queries. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationAdvances in Information Retrieval - 28th European Conference on IR Research, ECIR 2006, Proceedings
Pages277-288
Volume3936 LNCS
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2006
Externally publishedYes
Event28th European Conference on Information Retrieval Research, ECIR 2006 - London, United Kingdom
Duration: 10 Apr 200612 Apr 2006

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume3936 LNCS
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

Conference28th European Conference on Information Retrieval Research, ECIR 2006
PlaceUnited Kingdom
CityLondon
Period10/04/0612/04/06

Bibliographical note

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