Ranking Web Search Results Exploiting Wikipedia

Abstract

It is widely known that search engines are the dominating tools for finding information on the web. In most of the cases, these engines return web page references on a global ranking taking in mind either the importance of the web site or the relevance of the web pages to the identified topic. In this paper, we focus on the problem of determining distinct thematic groups on web search engine results that other existing engines provide. We additionally address the problem of dynamically adapting their ranking according to user selections, incorporating user judgments as implicitly registered in their selection of relevant documents. Our system exploits a state of the art semantic web data mining technique that identifies semantic entities of Wikipedia for grouping the result set in different topic groups, according to the various meanings of the provided query. Moreover, we propose a novel probabilistic Network scheme that employs the aforementioned topic identification method, in order to modify ranking of results as the users select documents. We evaluated in practice our implemented prototype with extensive experiments with the ClueWeb09 dataset using the TREC’s 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2012 Web Tracks’ where we observed improved retrieval performance compared to current state of the art re-ranking methods.