Improving Pseudo-Relevance Feedback in Web Information Retrieval Using Web Page Segmentation

  • Shipeng Yu ,
  • Deng Cai ,
  • Ji-Rong Wen ,
  • Wei-Ying Ma

MSR-TR-2002-124 |

Publication

In contrast to traditional document retrieval, a web page as a whole is not a good information unit to search because it often contains multiple topics and a lot of irrelevant information from navigation, decoration, and interaction part of the page. In this paper, we propose a VIsion-based Page Segmentation (VIPS) algorithm to detect the semantic content structure in a web page. Compared with simple DOM based segmentation method, our page segmentation scheme utilizes useful visual cues to obtain a better partition of a page at the semantic level. By using our VIPS algorithm to assist the selection of query expansion terms in pseudo-relevance feedback in web information retrieval, we achieve 27% performance improvement on Web Track dataset.