A web 2.0 approach for organizing search results using Wikipedia

Abstract

Most current search engines return a ranked list of results in response to the user's query. This simple approach may require the user to go through a long list of results to find the documents related to his information need. A common alternative is to cluster the search results and allow the user to browse the clusters, but this also imposes two challenges: 'how to define the clusters' and 'how to label the clusters in an informative way'. In this study, we propose an approach which uses Wikipedia as the source of information to organize the search results and addresses these two challenges. In response to a query, our method extracts a hierarchy of categories from Wikipedia pages and trains classifiers using web pages related to these categories. The search results are organized in the extracted hierarchy using the learned classifiers. Experiment results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed approach. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.