Query Modification by Discovering Topics from Web Page Structures

We propose a method that identifies from Web pages pairs of keywords in which one word describes the other and uses these relations to modify the query. It takes into account the positions of the words in the page structures when counting their occurrences and applies statistical tests to examine the differences between word co-occurrence rates. It finds related keywords more robustly regardless of the word type than the conventional methods, which do not consider page structures. It can also identify subject and description keywords in the user’s input and find additional keywords for detailing the query. By considering the document structures, our method can construct queries that are more focused on the user’s topic of interest.