Automatic maintenance of web directories by mining web browsing data

  • Authors:
  • Carlos Hurtado;Marcelo Mendoza

  • Affiliations:
  • Faculty of Engineering and Science, Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez, Santiago, Chile;Computer Science Department, Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María, Santiago, Chile

  • Venue:
  • Journal of Web Engineering
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

Web directories allow Web users to browse a hierarchy of categories, under which di-fferent types of resources are classified. We study the problem of maintaining a Webdirectory, that is, the problem of continually discovering and ranking resources that arerelevant to the categories of the directory. We propose an unsupervised computationalmethod that conducts the maintenance of the directory by analyses of user browsingdata. The method is based on the extraction and classification of user sessions (se-quences of resources selected by users) into the categories of the directory. In addition,we show that the directory maintenance method can be slightly modified to find queriesthat are useful to find relevant resources allowing users to switch from directory browsingto query formulation. Experimental results allow for affirmation that the proposed me-thods are effective, that they attain identification of new pages in each category and alsorecommend related queries with high precision, without needing labeled data to conducttraditional web page and query classification tasks.