Professor Max Bramer

Professor Max Bramer

Emeritus Professor of Information Technology, University of Portsmouth, UK
Honorary Secretary, International Federation for Information Processing
Chair, British Computer Society Specialist Group on Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence Research Group

Some Past Projects
Under Development

4. Web Search Results Clustering

Investigator(s): Ms. Xiaoxia Wang, Professor Max Bramer

As the number of documents on the web has proliferated, the low precision of conventional web search engines coupled with the flat ranked list presentation make it hard for users to find the information they are looking for. Grouping web search results into a hierarchy of topics provides an alternative to the flat ranked list and facilitates searching and browsing. This project explores web search results clustering, which can automatically generate hierarchies for web snippets returned by search engines. Topic hierarchies can provide two kinds of information: one is presenting the structure of the whole document collection so that the user can navigate to particular topics or sub-topics that contain information of interest; the second is generating a summary of each topic and sub-topic in the hierarchy to describe the documents that are found under them. We compare different clustering algorithms on web snippets returned by a search engine. We have a particular interest in different techniques of generating summaries (topic terms) for topics and are also interested in the evaluation of the hierarchies generated by clustering algorithms.