Automatically Summarising Web Sites - Is There A Way Around It?

Abstract

The challenge of automatically summarising Web pages and sites is a great one. However, currently there is no solution which offers an easy way to produce unbiased, coherent, and content-full summaries of Web sites. In this work we suggest a new approach, which relies on the structure of hypertext and the way people describe information in it. As a proof-of-concept, we applied our approach to the problem of tailoring coherent snippets for search results. In this paper we describe the approach as it is implemented in our system, InCommonSense, and present results from a large scale evaluation of the snippets produced. We conclude by suggesting other applications that could make use of this technique.