METHODS, APPARATUS AND COMPUTER PROGRAMS FOR CHARACTERIZING WEB RESOURCES

Methods, apparatus and computer programs are provided for characterizing Web-based information resources based on their interactions. A Web-based information resource is a single Web document or a collection of related Web documents. Unlike simple text documents, Web documents contain hyperlinks and other HTML tags. Different types of interactions, including inbound hyperlinks, outbound hyperlinks and internal links associated with a Web-based information resource, are used to characterize the Web-based information resource. A DOM tree representing the tag structure of a Web-based information resource is used to identify text items likely to be useful as context for a hyperlink anchor text, and the anchor text is combined with the context to generate a representation. The representation of Web-based information resources based on interactions can be used for clustering and classification, and in Web mining applications such as query disambiguation and automatic taxonomy generation.