Transposition of the cocitation method with a view to classifying Web pages

Abstract

The Web is a huge source of information, and one of the main problems facing users is finding documents which correspond to their requirements. Apart from the problem of thematic relevance, the documents retrieved by search engines do not always meet the users' expectations. The document may be too general, or conversely too specialized, or of a different type from what the user is looking for, and so forth. We think that adding metadata to pages can considerably improve the process of searching for information on the Web. This article presents a possible typology for Web sites and pages, as well as a method for propagating metadata values, based on the study of the Web graph and more specifically the method of cocitation in this graph. IntroductionThe role of the search engines available on the Web is to retrieve in the minimum amount of time the most relevant pages on a given subject. It uses traditional information retrieval system techniques particularly for the representation of documents and queries and for matching systems. The aim is twofold: to find relevant Web pages and then rank them according to relevance. The search engines come up against two major difficulties. The first, which is well known when searching for information using uncontrolled vocabulary as is the case with full-text searching, concerns language-based issues such as synonymy and polysemy, which lead to either noise or silence. The second is directly related to the heterogeneous nature of the Web. In contrast to databases working on homogeneous corpuses of documents, that is, sets of selected documents assembled by the same authority and sharing common properties (collections of scientific articles, patents, etc.), the Web is a forum of free expression that develops in an anarchic manner. It is disorganized and contains totally heterogeneous resources as far as language, subject, level, type, target audience, and the like, are concerned. In such a world, quite apart from the problem of thematic relevance, it is difficult to find resources which correspond to the need (Gravano, 2000). Take the example of a Spanish student and a Spanish researcher, both of whom are looking for information in nuclear physics. The first will look at papers in Spanish at a fairly basic level, while the second will look for scientific articles probably written in English, and possibly also at calls for papers or other documents relating to his or her scientific activity.Along with many, we think that the use of metadata could greatly improve information retrieval on the Web (Marchiori, 1998). We are aware that we cannot count on all resource authors to correctly assign the proper metadata values, because this requires time, skill, and objectivity. To obtain a uniform and systematic description of resources, assigning metadata values should be the work of an information retrieval system done in the same way as documentation professionals carry out cataloging and indexing tasks. Because the manual application of metadata values is very costly, and given the ...

Application of graph theory in the library domain—Building a faceted framework based on a literature review

“…The emerging interest in network science and the World Wide Web in the late 1990s (Watts, 2004) led to a more thorough examination of (mathematical) network properties (An et al, 2002; Egghe and Rousseau, 2002; Yong and Rousseau, 2001) and the transfer of the idea of co-citation to web documents (Prime-Claverie et al, 2004). Approaches to (co-)citation were combined with bibliometrics, network analysis, textual information, and author collaboration, (Ding, 2011; Ganguly and Pudi, 2017; Lim and Buntine, 2014, 2016) evaluated (Boyack and Klavans, 2010; Leydesdorff and Vaughan, 2006; Lu and Wolfram, 2012) and used in varying areas such as recommender systems (Habib and Afzal, 2017; Küçüktunç et al, 2012), journal ranking (Kalaitzidakis et al, 2003), and classification (Leydesdorff, 2004).…”

Les temps du document et la recherche d'information

“…Par exemple, la méthode des cocitations introduite par Small (1973) permet de structurer un corpus par les citations qu'il fait dans son passé. L'utilisation de cette méthode sur un graphe de citations qui n'est plus seulement orienté vers le passé, comme celui de la Toile, permet de faire émerger de nouvelles interprétations (Prime-Claverie et al, 2004) où la structuration n'est plus seulement dans l'espace documentaire mais dans l'espace des acteurs qui ont participé à la publication des documents.…”

Metadata Propagation in the Web Using Co-Citations

“…In order to evaluate our propagation module, we defined two indices [5] to measure the propagation quality and the method cost, the latter in terms of the quantity of work to be manually done. The quality index Qual is the ratio between the number of rightly propagated metadata values and the number of propagated metadata values.…”