Building Contextual Anchor Text Representation using Graph Regularization

Anchor texts are useful complementary description for target pages, widely applied to improve search relevance. The benefits come from the additional information introduced into document representation and the intelligent ways of estimating their relative importance. Previous work on anchor importance estimation treated anchor text independently without considering its context. As a result, the lack of constraints from such context fails to guarantee a stable anchor text representation. We propose an anchor graph regularization approach to incorporate constraints from such context into anchor text weighting process, casting the task into a convex quadratic optimization problem. The constraints draw from the estimation of anchor-anchor, anchorpage, and page-page similarity. Based on any estimators, our approach operates as a post process of refining the estimated anchor weights, making it a plug and play component in search infrastructure. Comparable experiments on standard data sets (TREC 2009 and 2010) demonstrate the efficacy of our approach.