CWS: a comparative web search system

  • Authors:
  • Jian-Tao Sun;Xuanhui Wang;Dou Shen;Hua-Jun Zeng;Zheng Chen

  • Affiliations:
  • Microsoft Research Asia, Beijing, P.R.China;University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign;Hong Kong University of Science and Technology;Microsoft Research Asia, Beijing, P.R.China;Microsoft Research Asia, Beijing, P.R.China

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 15th international conference on World Wide Web
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

In this paper, we define and study a novel search problem: Comparative Web Search (CWS). The task of CWS is to seek relevant and comparative information from the Web to help users conduct comparisons among a set of topics. A system called CWS is developed to effectively facilitate Web users' comparison needs. Given a set of queries, which represent the topics that a user wants to compare, the system is characterized by: (1) automatic retrieval and ranking of Web pages by incorporating both their relevance to the queries and the comparative contents they contain; (2) automatic clustering of the comparative contents into semantically meaningful themes; (3) extraction of representative keyphrases to summarize the commonness and differences of the comparative contents in each theme. We developed a novel interface which supports two types of view modes: a pair-view which displays the result in the page level, and a cluster-view which organizes the comparative pages into the themes and displays the extracted phrases to facilitate users' comparison. Experiment results show the CWS system is effective and efficient.