Abstract
The aim of the work described in this paper is to evaluate the influencing effects of query-biased summaries in web searching. For this purpose, a summarisation system has been developed, and a summary tailored to the user's query is generated automatically for each document retrieved. The system aims to provide both a better means of assessing document relevance than titles or abstracts typical of many web search result lists. Through visiting each result page at retrieval-time, the system provides the user with an idea of the current page content and thus deals with the dynamic nature of the web.To examine the effectiveness of this approach, a task-oriented, comparative evaluation between four different web retrieval systems was performed; two that use query-biased summarisation, and two that use the standard ranked titles/abstracts approach. The results from the evaluation indicate that query-biased summarisation techniques appear to be more useful and effective in helping users gauge document relevance than the traditional ranked titles/abstracts approach. The same methodology was used to compare the effectiveness of two of the web's major search engines; Alta Vista and Google.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 707-733 |
| Number of pages | 26 |
| Journal | Information Processing and Management |
| Volume | 39 |
| Issue number | 5 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 2003 |
Keywords
- information retrieval
- searching
- web searching
- query-biased
- search engines