Biasing web search results for topic familiarity

Depending on a web searcher’s familiarity with a query’s target topic, it may be more appropriate to show her introductory or advanced documents. The TREC HARD [1] track defined topic familiarity as meta-data associated with a user’s query. We instead define a user-independent and queryindependent model of topic-familiarity required to read a document, so it can be matched to a given user in response to a query. An introductory web page is defined as A web page that doesn’t presuppose any background knowledge of the topic it is on, and to an extent introduces or defines the key terms in the topic. while an advanced web page is defined as A web page that assumes sufficient background knowledge of the topic it is on, and familiarity with the key technical/ important terms in the topic, and potentially builds on them. We develop a method for biasing the initial mix of documents returned by a search engine to increase the number of documents of desired familiarity level up to...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: CIKM
• Authors: Giridhar Kumaran, Rosie Jones, Omid Madani
• Keywords: CIKM 2005, Familiarity, Topic Familiarity, Web Page