AuGEAS: authoritativeness grading, estimation, and sorting

  • Authors:
  • Ayman Farahat;Geoff Nunberg;Francine Chen

  • Affiliations:
  • Palo Alto Research Center, Palo Alto, CA;Palo Alto Research Center, Palo Alto, CA;Palo Alto Research Center, Palo Alto, CA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the eleventh international conference on Information and knowledge management
  • Year:
  • 2002

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Abstract

When searching for content in in a large heterogeneous document collections like the World Wide Web it is not easy to know which documents provide reliable authoritative information about a subject. The problem is particularly pointed as it concerns content search for "high-value" informational needs such as retrieving medical information, where the cost of error may be high. In this paper, a method is described for estimating the authoritativeness of a document based on textual, non-topical cues. This method is complementary to estimates of authoritativeness based on link structure, such as the PageRank and HITS algorithms. This method is particularly suited to "high-value" content search where the user is interested in searching for information about a specific topic. A method for combining textual estimates of authoritativeness with link analysis is also presented. The types of textual cues to authoritativeness that are easily computed and utilized by our method are described, as well as the method used to select a subset of cues to increase the computation speed. Methods for applying authoritativeness estimates to re-ranking documents returned from search engines, combining textual authoritativeness with social authority, and use in query expansion are also presented. By combining textual authority with link analysis, a more complete and robust estimate can be made of a document's authoritativeness.