Heading-Aware Snippet Generation for Web Search

We propose heading-aware methods of generating search result snippets of web pages. A heading is a brief description of the topic of its associated sentences. Some existing methods give priority to sentences containing many words that also appear in headings when selecting sentences to be included in snippets with limited length. However, according to our observation, words in heading are very often omitted from their associated sentences because readers can understand the topic of the sentences by reading their heading. To score sentences considering such omission, our methods count keyword occurrences in their headings as well as in the sentences themselves. Our evaluation result indicated that our methods were effective only for queries with clear intents or containing four or more keywords. To discuss the statistical significance of the result, another evaluation with more queries is needed.