A task-oriented study on the influencing effects of query-biased summarisation in web searching

  • Authors:

  • Ryen W. White;Joemon M. Jose;Ian Ruthven

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Computing Science, University of Glasgow, Glasgow G12 8QQ, Scotland, UK;Department of Computing Science, University of Glasgow, Glasgow G12 8QQ, Scotland, UK;Department of Computer and Information Sciences, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow G1 1XH, Scotland, UK

  • Venue:
  • Information Processing and Management: an International Journal
  • Year:
  • 2003

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Abstract

The aim of the work described in this paper is to evaluate the influencing effects of query-biased summaries in web searching. For this purpose, a summarisation system has been developed, and a summary tailored to the user's query is generated automatically for each document retrieved. The system aims to provide both a better means of assessing document relevance than titles or abstracts typical of many web search result lists. Through visiting each result page at retrieval-time, the system provides the user with an idea of the current page content and thus deals with the dynamic nature of the web.To examine the effectiveness of this approach, a task-oriented, comparative evaluation between four different web retrieval systems was performed; two that use query-biased summarisation, and two that use the standard ranked titles/abstracts approach. The results from the evaluation indicate that query-biased summarisation techniques appear to be more useful and effective in helping users gauge document relevance than the traditional ranked titles/abstracts approach. The same methodology was used to compare the effectiveness of two of the web's major search engines; Alta Vista and Google.