Hierarchical Topic Segmentation of Websites

Abstract:

In this paper, we consider the problem of identifying and segmenting topically cohesive regions in the URL tree of a large website. Each page of the website is assumed to have a topic label or a distribution on topic labels generated using a standard classifier. We develop a set of cost measures characterizing the benefit accrued by introducing a segmentation of the site based on the topic labels. We propose a general framework to use these measures for describing the quality of a segmentation; we also provide an efficient algorithm to find the best segmentation in this framework. Extensive experiments on human-labeled data confirm the soundness of our framework and suggest that a judicious choice of cost measures allows the algorithm to perform surprisingly accurate topical segmentations.