Computational Models of Relevance Propagation in Web Directories

XAMENA E.; BRIGNOLE N. B.; MAGUITMAN A.G.

Córdoba

Congreso; ASAI 2011 40 JAIIO, Jornadas Argentinas de Informática; 2011

SADIO

Web Directories consist of large collections of links to websites, arranged by topic in different categories. The structure of Web Directories is typically not flat, since there are hierarchical and non-hierarchical relationships among topics. As a consequence, websites classified under certain topic may be relevant to other topics. While some of these relevance relations are explicit, most of them must be discovered by an analysis of the structure of these directories. This paper proposes a family of models of relevance propagation in Web Directories. An efficient computational framework for inferring implicit relevance relations is described. The framework presented here combines the use of matrices to represent relevance relations and the application of boolean operations on these matrices to infer implicit relations. Nine different models were computed for a portion of the Open Directory Project graph consisting of more than half a million nodes and approximately 1.5 million edges of different types. The models were compared by performing both a quantitative and qualitative analysis on them. It is found that some general difficulties rule out the possibility of defining flawless models of relevance propagation that only take into account structural features of Web Directories.