A Learning Algorithm for Web Page Scoring Systems

Hyperlink analysis is a successful approach to define algorithms which compute the relevance of a document on the basis of the citation graph. In this paper we propose a technique to learn the parameters of the page ranking model using a set of pages labeled as relevant or not relevant by a supervisor. In particular we describe a learning algorithm applied to a scheme similar to PageRank. The ranking algorithm is based on a probabilistic Web surfer model and its parameters are optimized in order to increase the probability of the surfer to visit a page labeled as relevant and to reduce it for the pages labeled as not relevant. The experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed technique in reorganizing the page ordering in the ranking list accordingly to the examples provided in the learning set.