1 Block-based Web Search Deng Cai *1, Shipeng Yu *2, Ji-Rong Wen * and Wei-Ying Ma * * Microsoft Research Asia 1 Tsinghua University 2 University of Munich

2 2 Problems in Traditional IR Term-Document Irrelevance Problem –Noisy terms –Multiple topics Variant Document Length Problem –Length normalization is important Passage Retrieval in traditional IR –Partition the document to several passages –Solve the problem in some sense –Has three types of passages: discourse, semantic, window –Fixed-window passage is shown to be robust

3 3 Problems in Web IR Noisy information –Navigation –Decoration –Interaction –…–… Multiple topics –May contain text as well as images or links Noisy Information Multiple Topics

4 4 Problems in Web IR (Cont.) Variant Document Length Problem Conclusion: in web IR all the problems of traditional IR remain and are more severe! TREC-2&4TREC-4&5WT10g.GOV Number of doc524,929556,0771,692,0961,247,753 Text size (Mb)2,0592,13410,19018,100 Median length (Kb) Average length (Kb)

5 5 Challenges in Web IR New characteristics of web pages –Two-Dimensional Logical Structure –Visual Layout Presentation Page segmentation methods can be achieved –Obtain blocks from web pages –Block-based web search is possible Space Color Font Style Font Size Separator

6 6 Outline Motivation Page segmentation approaches Web search using page segmentation –Block Retrieval –Block-level Query Expansion Experiments and Discussions Conclusion

7 7 Web Page Segmentation Approaches Fixed-length approach (FixedPS) –Traditional window-based passage retrieval DOM-based approach (DomPS) –Like the natural paragraph in traditional passage retrieval Vision-based Web Page Segmentation (VIPS) –Achieve a semantic partition to some extent Combined Approach (CombPS) –Combined VIPS & Fixed-length Web Page Segmentation FixedPSDomPSVIPSCombPS Passage Retrieval WindowDiscourseSemantic Semantic Window

8 8 Fixed-length Page Segmentation (FixedPS) A block contains words of fixed-length Traditional window-based methods can be applied Approaches –Overlapped windows (e.g. Callan, SIGIR’94) –Arbitrary passages of varying length (e.g. Kaszkiel et al, SIGIR’97) Results –A simple but robust approach –Do not consider semantic information

9 9 DOM-based Page Segmentation (DomPS) Rely on the DOM structure to partition the page –DOM: Document-Object Model Current approaches –Only base on tags (e.g. Crivellari et al, TREC 9) –Combine tags with contents and links (e.g. Chakrabarti et al, SIGIR’01) Results –Similar to discourse in passage retrieval –DOM represents only part of the semantic structure –Imprecise content structure

10 VIPS Algorithm Motivation –Topics can be distinguished with visual cues in many cases –Utilize the two-dimensional structure of web pages Goal –Extract the semantic structure of a web page to some extent, based on its visual presentation Procedure –Top-down partition the web page based on the separators Result –A tree structure, each node in the tree corresponds to a block in the page –Each node will be assigned a value (Degree of Coherence) to indicate how coherent of the content in the block based on visual perception

11 VIPS: An Example Microsoft Technical Report MSR-TR

12 Combined Approach (CombPS) VIPS solves the problems of noisy information and multi-topics FixedPS can deal with the variant document length problem Combine these two: –Partition the webpage using VIPS –Divide the blocks containing more words than pre-defined window length Block length after segment 50,000 pages using VIPS chosen from the WT10g data set

13 Web Page Segmentation Summarization Fixed-length approach (FixedPS) –traditional passage retrieval DOM-based approach (DomPS) –Like the natural paragraph in traditional passage retrieval Vision-based Web Page Segmentation (VIPS) –Achieve a semantic partition to some extent Combined Approach (CombPS) –Combined VIPS & Fixed-length Web Page Segmentation FixedPSDomPSVIPSCombPS Passage Retrieval WindowDiscourseSemantic Semantic Window

14 Outline Motivation Page segmentation approaches Web search using page segmentation –Block Retrieval –Block-level Query Expansion Experiments and Discussions Conclusion

15 Block Retrieval Similar to traditional passage retrieval Retrieve blocks instead of full documents Combine the relevance of blocks with relevance of documents Goal: –Verify if page segmentation can deal with both the length normalization and multiple-topic problems

16 Block-level Query Expansion Similar to passage-level pseudo-relevance feedback Expansion terms are selected from top blocks instead of top documents Goal: –Testify if page segmentation can benefit the selection of query terms through increasing term correlations within a block, and thus improve the final performance

17 Outline Motivation Page segmentation approaches Web search using page segmentation –Block Retrieval –Block-level Query Expansion Experiments and Discussions Conclusion

18 Experiments Methodology –Fixed-length window approach (FixedPS) Overlapped window with size of 200 words –DOM-based approach (DomPS) Iterate the DOM tree for some structural tags A block is constructed and identified by such leaf tag Free text between two tags is treated as a special block –Vision-based approach (VIPS) The permitted degree of coherence is set to 0.6 All the leaf nodes are extracted as visual blocks –The combined approach (CombPS) VIPS then FixedPS –Full document approach (FullDoc) No segmentation is performed

19 Experiments (Cont.) Dataset –TREC 2001 Web Track WT10g corpus (1.69 million pages), crawled at queries (topics ) –TREC 2002 Web Track.GOV corpus (1.25 million pages), crawled at queries (topics ) Retrieval System –Okapi, with weighting function BM2500 Preprocessing –Standard stop-word list –Do not use stemming and phrase information Tune parameters in BM2500 to achieve best baselines Evaluation criteria:

20 Experiments on Block Retrieval Steps: 1.Do original document retrieval –Obtain a document rank DR 2.Analyze top N (1000 here) documents to get a block set 3.Do block retrieval on the block set (same as Step 1 but replace the document with block) –Obtain a block rank BR –Documents are re-ranked by the single-best block in each document 4.Combine the BR and DR to get a new rank of document – – is the tuning parameter

21 Block Retrieval on TREC 2001 and TREC 2002 Page Segmentation BaselineBR onlyBR + DR best DomPS FixedPS VIPS CombPS Page Segmentation BaselineBR onlyBR + DR best DomPS FixedPS VIPS CombPS Result on TREC 2001 Result on TREC 2002

22 Experiments on Block-level Query Expansion Steps: 1.Same steps as block retrieval –Do original document retrieval to get DR –Analyze top N (1000 here) documents to get a block set –Do block retrieval on the block set to get BR 2.Select some expansion terms based on top blocks –10 expansion terms in our experiments –Number of top blocks is a tuning parameter 3.Document retrieval with the expanded query –Modify the term weights before final retrieval

23 Query Expansion on TREC 2001 and TREC 2002 Page Segmentation Baseline Query Expansion (best) FullDoc % DomPS % FixedPS % VIPS % CombPS % Result on TREC 2001 Result on TREC 2002 Page Segmentation Baseline Query Expansion (best) FullDoc % DomPS % FixedPS % VIPS % CombPS %

24 Discussions FullDoc can only obtain a low and insignificant result –The baseline is low, so many top ranked documents are actually irrelevant DomPS is not good and very unstable –The segmentation is too detailed –Semantic block can hardly be detected and expansion terms are not good FixedPS is stable and good –Similar result as the case in traditional IR –A window may miss the real semantic blocks VIPS is very good –Top blocks usually have very good quality –Length normalization is still a problem CombPS is almost the best method in all experiments –More than just a tradeoff

25 Outline Motivation Page segmentation approaches Web search using page segmentation –Block Retrieval –Block-level Query Expansion Experiments and Discussions Conclusion

26 Conclusion Page segmentation is effective for improving web search –Block Retrieval –Block-level Query Expansion Plain-text retrieval  Fixed-window’s partition Web information retrieval  Semantic partition (VIPS) Integrating both semantic and fixed-length properties (CombPS) could deal with all problems and achieve the best performance We believe that block-based web search can be very useful in real search engines, and can also be very easily combined with block-level link analysis

27 Thanks!