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Dynamic content-page identification for media-rich websites

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Abstract

Knowledge of the information goal of users is critical in website design, analyzing the efficacy of such designs, and in ensuring effective user-access to desired information. Determining the information goal is complex due to the subjective and latent nature of user information needs. This challenge is further exacerbated in media-rich websites since the semantics of media-based information is context-based and emergent. A critical step in determining information goals lies in the identification of content pages. These are the pages which contain the information the user seeks. We propose a method to automatically determine the content pages by taking into account the organization of the web site, the media-based information content, as well as the influence of a specific user browsing pattern. Given a specific browsing pattern, in our method, putative content pages are identified as the pages corresponding to the local minima of page-content entropy values. For an (unknown) user information goal this intuitively corresponds to modeling the progressive transition of the user from pages with generic information to those with specific information. Experimental investigations on media rich sites demonstrate the effectiveness of the technique and underline its potential in modeling user information needs and actions in a media-rich web.

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Acknowledgments

The authors thank the anonymous reviewers for comments that helped in improving the quality and presentation of the paper. The authors also thank Mike Wong for his participation in early parts of this research, results from which were published in [2]. Jim Gray from Microsoft Research showed great enthusiasm for this research, participated in numerous discussions, and was instrumental in providing access to the Skyserver logs. This work was funded, in part, by a Microsoft research grant to RS.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, San Francisco State University, San Francisco, CA, 94132, USA

    Rahul Singh & Bibek D. Bhattarai

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  1. Rahul Singh
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  2. Bibek D. Bhattarai
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Correspondence to Rahul Singh.

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Singh, R., Bhattarai, B.D. Dynamic content-page identification for media-rich websites. Multimed Tools Appl 50, 491–507 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-010-0487-1

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