Aspect Discovery: Web Contents Characterization by Their Referential Contexts

Abstract

A web page is referred to by other pages through links in various contexts, and these contexts indicate the “customer’s viewpoint” for the page. The references are called “aspects” of a web page, as distinguished from the content of the page. In this paper, we propose an approach for discovering aspects to characterize web pages based on their referential context. Based on the logical structure of the web (i.e., the web document structure and link structure), our approach discovers the appropriate range of surrounding contents and assigns them as the context of the web page. The aspects of the web page are discovered by clustering multiple contexts so that each aspect represents a “typical reference” to the page. The aspect can be used to strengthen the usability and credibility of a web page.