A New Web Search Result Clustering based on True Common Phrase Label

Discovery

Jongkol Janruang * and Worapoj Kreesuradej**

Faculty of Information Technology
King Mongkut’s Institute of Technology Ladkrabang
Bankok, 15320 Thailand
Email: tawan48@gmail.com* and worapoj@it.kmitl.ac.th**

Abstract of suffix tree, particularly when the same snippets are

Web search results clustering are navigator
for users to search results. Therefore the correct cluster
label is important which has been index the set of web
document. Suffix Tree Clustering (STC) is fast
automatically clustering and labeling. However, STC
is inadequate since they generate interrupted cluster
label due to using n-gram technique. In this paper, we
propose an approach for web search results clustering
and labeling based on a new suffix tree data structure,
a new base cluster combining algorithm with a new
partial phase join operation. The algorithm for
constructing the data structure is an incremental and a
linear time algorithm. Thus, the proposed approach is
suitable for on-the-fly the web search results clustering
and labeling cluster. The proposed approach provides
more readable and true common phrase of web
document cluster than conventional web search result
clustering. Experimental results also show that the
proposed approach has better performance than that of
conventional web search result clustering.
Keyword: web search results clustering, incremental
clustering, content based combining, a new suffix tree.
1. Introduction
Several approaches underneath description-
comes-first concept such as web search results
clustering approaches using Lingo algorithm [1, 2, 3],
SHOC [4] and FIHC [5]. That is not incremental
clustering algorithm.
Unlike the other algorithms, suffix tree
clustering (STC) algorithm, which is an algorithm for
clustering search results, is an incremental algorithm.
Therefore, web search result clustering based on this
algorithm is a promising approach to work on a long
list of snippets returned by search engines. The
original STC algorithm can often construct a long path
feed to the STC algorithm [7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12]. Hau-
Jun Zeng and etc. [12] introduced an improved suffix
tree with n-gram to deal with the problem of the
original suffix tree. However, the suffix tree with n-
gram can discover only partial common phases when
the length of n-gram is shorter than the length of true
common phases. As an example, Given that a true
common phase is “President William Jefferson
Clinton”, a suffix tree with 2-gram can discover partial
common phases: “President William”, “William
Jefferson” and “Jefferson Clinton.” If this is the case,
STC with n-gram give too many base clusters. In
addition, a cluster label obtained from STC with n-
gram can not be a true common phase when the length
of n-gram is shorter than the length of true common
phases.
Here, this paper proposes a new approach for
web search result clustering to deal with such
problems. The new approach still uses a suffix tree
with n-gram. However, the approach also introduces a
new base cluster combining technique with a new
partial phase join operation to find a true common
phase. The new approach provides more precision and
true common phrase of web document cluster than the
approach that is based on the previous STC algorithms.
2. A New Web Search Result Clustering
based on True Common Phrase Label
Discovery
Clustering web search results is to group each
snippet, returned by search engines, with others
sharing a common content and to generate new cluster
labels from interrupted cluster label due to using n-
gram technique. The new approach composes of four
phases which the algorithm is given in figure 1.

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 Basically, the new approach has four phases: (1)
document “cleaning” using stemming algorithm and
non-word tokens are stripped, (2) identifying base
clusters using a suffix tree data structure with n-gram.
This data structure can be constructed incrementally
and in time linear with the size of the collection. Each
node of a suffix tree represents a group of snippets and
the label of node represents the common phrase, (3)
combining together similar base clusters using a binary
similarity measure between base clusters, and (4)
ranking base clusters according to their interesting
scores . The phases of the new approach are discussed
in the following section.
Figure1. As Shown The Pseudo-code of Web Search
Results Clustering.
2.1. Pre-processing
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Pre-processing is selecting the most suitable
terms that describing better content. The terms are
transformed using stemming algorithm. Non-word
tokens, such as Articles, pronouns, prepositions, and
etc., are eliminated [13].
2.2. Base Cluster Identification
Base Cluster Identification is identification base
clusters using suffix tree with n-gram technique. The
major steps are shown as bellows.
• Building suffix tree with n-gram. As an
example, a suffix tree with n<=3 gram is shown in
figure 3 given that a set of 5 snippets shown in figure 2
are used for building the suffix tree.
Figure2. As Shown a set of 5 snippets
Figuare3. A Suffix Tree with n-gram (where n<=3)
• As shown in figure 4, the suffix tree from
figure 4 is updated or compacted internal nodes that
are not contains snippets and number of link equal to
one. Then, The label of a node is defined to be the
concatenation of the edge-labels on the path from the
root to that node

Figuare4. Seven Base Cluster of Suffix Tree
• Building a list of base clusters from internal
nodes which contain at least one snippet at leaf nodes.
Then, base clusters that their common phrases contain
only query words are eliminated. According to figure
4, a list of base clusters are shown in Table 1. From
table1, query word is “Jefferson Clinton”. Therefore,
cluster that contains “Jefferson Clinton”, “Jefferson”
and “Clinton” are filtered out.
Table 1: A list of base clusters
2.3. A New Base Cluster Combining
Algorithm with A New Partial Phase Join
Operation
Since snippets may share more than one phrase
with other snippets, each snippet might appear in a
number of base clusters. Therefore, base clusters,
obtained from a suffix tree, can have an overlap of
snippets. Overlap of snippets indicates that snippets
often have several topics [7][11]. However, high
overlap of irrelevance snippets in multiple clusters can
hurt cluster quality. In addition, STC with n-gram may
give too many base clusters and STC with n-gram can
not discover a true common phase when the length of
n-gram is shorter than the length of true common
phases.
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To reduce a number of base clusters and to find a
true common phase, a new base cluster combining
technique with a new partial phase join operation is
proposed. The phase join operator is shown in Eq.1.
⎧a0 ⊕ ⎫
⎪ ⎪
⎪a1 = b0 ⎪
⎪⎪a = b ⎪⎪
A⊕ B = ⎨ 2 1 ⎬if (A(d ) ⊆ B(d ) or B(d ) ⊆ A(d ) ) (1)
⎪ M ⎪
⎪an = bn−1 ⎪
⎪ ⎪
⎪⎩⊕ bn ⎪⎭
where A and B are base clusters, A( d ) is snippets in A
cluster, B( d ) is snippets in B cluster,
{a0 , a1 ,....., an } is a set of terms that appear in label
of A cluster and {b0 , b1 ,....., bn } is set of terms that
appear in label of B cluster.
The base cluster combining technique uses the
new join operator to define a new common phase of a
new cluster when merging a pair of similar base
clusters. As an example, given that
A ={president, William, Jefferson } (0,1)(0,2) and
B ={William, Jefferson, Clinton } (1,0)(1,1)(1,2)(0,3)
a new common phase is defined as
A⊕B={president,William,Jefferson,Clinton}(1,1)(1,2)
After combining a pair of similarity base clusters, we
remove snippets that belong to the new cluster from
the old base cluster. Therefore, the result of combining
a pair of A cluster and B cluster is
B={William, Jefferson, Clinton } (1,0)(0,3)
A⊕ B ={president,william,jefferson,clinton}(1,1)(1,2)
According to Table.1, the results of combining a pair
of similarity base clusters are shown in Table 2.
Table 2: Results of Content Based Combining Base
 2.4. Ranking Cluster query Num. of cluster Num. of snippet
computer 7 7619
Ranking cluster is reordering clusters according music 7 7073
to their interesting scores. In this paper, the equation search 10 7970
for computing an interesting score, shown in Eq. 2, is
“data mining” 6 320
modified from Hua-Jun Zeng and et.at [12].
apple 7 1765
S (m) = d * f m p * f (query )* ∑ tfidf ( pi , d ) (2) disney 8 1318
Thailand 6 583
jaguar 5 637
⎧0, if p = 1 ⎫
⎪ ⎪ matrix 7 1365
f m p = ⎨ p , if 2 ≤ p ≤ 8⎬ total 28,650
⎪ ⎪
⎩α , if p > 8 ⎭
Table 4: queries used to generate test collection.

⎧100 , if query word apprear in phrase ⎫ Performance of precision or relevant web documents
f (query ) = ⎨ ⎬
⎩1 , if query word not apprear in phrase ⎭ cluster for queries. As shown in Figure 5.

where |d| is the number of snippets in m cluster, |mp| is

the number of word in m phrase, f ( query ) is query
word adjustment and tfidf(pi ,d) is a score that is
calculated from the Eq.3. tfidf(pi ,d) is an inverse
phrase frequency and is defined as

tfidf ( pi ,d ) =(1+ log(tf ( pi ,d )))*log(1+ N / df ( pi )) (3)

where df(pi) is number of snippets that phrase pi appear

in, tf( pi ,d) is the number of occurrence of phrase pi
in snippet d and N is the total number of snippet in our
snippet set. According to Table2, the interesting score
of each cluster is shown in Table 3.

Figure5. The average of precision

Percentage of true common phrase equal 100. That we

Table 3: Results the Ranking evaluate by compare with cluster labels and whole
snippets. Our cluster label is true common phrase and
more readable than conventional STC with n-gram
technique (STC + n-gram). As shown in Table 4 and 5,
3. Experimental Results that is example of “Thailand” and “data mining” is
query words.
Due to lacks of standard dataset for testing
web search results clustering, we have to build a small
test dataset. For this purpose, we have defined a set of
queries for which search results were collected from
Dmoz.com [8]. The results of the proposed approach
are shown in table 4.

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 Table 4: Example cluster labels for “Thailand” that is query word

Table 5: Example cluster labels for “data mining” that is query word

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 4. Conclusion Technology, 2002.

[11] Oren Zamir and Oren Etzioni, “Document Clustering :

This paper proposes a new approach for web A Feasibility Demonstation”, International ACM SIGIR,
search result clustering to improve the performance of 1998, pp 46-54.
approaches that uses the previous STC algorithms.
According to the preliminary experiment results, the [12] Hua-Jun Zeng and et.at., “Learning to Cluster Web
new approach provides smaller clusters and more Search Results ”, SIGIR’04 , Peking University, 2004.
readable cluster label than that approach using the
previous STC algorithms. [13] M. F. Porter, “An algorithm for suffix stripping ” ,
Program, 14(3), pp.130-137, 1980.
5. References [14] Open Directory Project. http://dmoz.org.
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