SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR CLASSIFYING TAGS OF CONTENT USING A HYPERLINKED CORPUS OF CLASSIFIED WEB PAGES

• US 20090265315A1
• Filed: 04/18/2008
• Published: 10/22/2009
• Est. Priority Date: 04/18/2008
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: R2 Solutions LLC (Acacia Research Corporation)
• Original Assignee: Yahoo! Inc. (Apollo Global Management, Inc.)
• Inventors: Van Zwol, Roelof, Sigurbjornsson, Borkur, Overell, Simon E.
• Granted Patent: US 8,046,361 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 1/1
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/954 Navigation, e.g. using categorised browsing

Abstract

An improved system and method for classifying tags of content using a hyperlinked corpus of classified web pages is provided. An anchor text index may be searched to find anchor texts that may match text of the tag, documents referenced by the matching anchor texts may be found, and the documents referenced by the matching anchor texts may be grouped to disambiguate multiple classifications that result from matching the anchor texts with the categories of the reference documents. To resolve ambiguity between multiple classifications, weighted classifications may be used where each document may be assigned a positive weight for a mapping to a category to indicate the confidence of the classification of the document to the category. The classification for the grouping of the documents referenced by the matching anchor texts with greatest frequency may be selected and output as the classification for the tag.

Claims

1. A computer system for classifying a tag associated with content, comprising:

a tag classification engine for classifying a tag associated with content of a web document with a category associated with one or more documents in a classified corpus of hyperlinked web documents referred by one or more anchor texts matching the text of the tag; and

a storage operably coupled to the tag classification engine for storing a plurality of categories of tags classified with the category associated with one or more documents in the classified corpus of hyperlinked web documents referred by the one or more anchor texts matching the text of the tag.

2. The system of claim 1 further comprising an anchor text search engine operably coupled to the tag classification engine for searching an anchor text index to find the one or more anchor texts in the classified corpus of hyperlinked web documents that match the text of the tag.

3. The system of claim 1 further comprising a disambiguation engine operably coupled to the tag classification engine for resolving ambiguities in the classification of the one or more documents by grouping the one or more documents referred by the one or more anchor texts matching the text of the tag.

4. The system of claim 1 wherein the storage further comprises an anchor text index of a plurality of anchor texts referring to a plurality of documents in the classified corpus of hyperlinked web documents.

5. A computer-readable medium having computer-executable components comprising the system of claim 1.

6. A computer-implemented method for classifying a tag associated with content, comprising:

matching text of a tag associated with content of a web document with one or more anchor texts in a classified corpus of hyperlinked web documents;

finding one or more documents referenced by the one or more anchor texts in the classified corpus of hyperlinked web documents;

grouping the one or more documents by one or more classifications;

selecting a classification associated with the grouping of the one or more documents referenced by the one or more anchor texts; and

outputting the classification for the tag associated with the content of the web document.

7. The method of claim 6 further comprising receiving the tag associated with content of the web document.

8. The method of claim 6 further comprising searching an anchor text index to find the one or more anchor texts in the classified corpus of hyperlinked web documents that match text of the tag.

9. The method of claim 6 further comprising constructing a list of the one or more documents represented as a triplet of a document name, a category and a frequency.

10. The method of claim 6 wherein selecting the classification associated with the grouping of the one or more documents referenced by the one or more anchor texts comprises selecting the classification associated with the grouping of the one or more documents referenced by the one or more anchor texts with greatest frequency.

11. The method of claim 6 wherein finding one or more documents referenced by the one or more anchor texts in the classified corpus of hyperlinked web documents comprises finding one or more documents referenced more than four times by the one or more anchor texts in the classified corpus of hyperlinked web documents.

12. The method of claim 6 wherein grouping the one or more documents by one or more classifications comprises constructing a list of categories with each category in the list represented by a tuple of the category and a sum of the frequencies of the one of more documents classified in the category referenced by the one or more anchor texts.

13. The method of claim 6 wherein matching text of a tag associated with content of a web document with one or more anchor texts in a classified corpus of hyperlinked web documents comprises normalizing the one or more anchor texts by removing white space and converting characters to lower case.

14. The method of claim 6 wherein matching text of the tag associated with content of the web document with one or more anchor texts in the classified corpus of hyperlinked web documents comprises matching text of the tag in a tagged listing of a corpus of hyperlinked web documents.

15. The method of claim 14 further comprising generating the tagged listing of the corpus of hyperlinked web documents.

16. A computer-readable medium having computer-executable instructions for performing the method of claim 6.

17. A computer system for classifying a tag associated with content, comprising:

means for matching text of a tag associated with content of a web document with one or more anchor texts in a classified corpus of hyperlinked web documents;

means for matching the one or more anchor texts with one or more categories of one or more documents in the classified corpus of hyperlinked web documents; and

means for outputting at least one classification for the tag associated with the content of the web document.

18. The computer system of claim 17 further comprising means for finding the one or more documents referenced by the one or more anchor texts in the classified corpus of hyperlinked web documents.

19. The computer system of claim 17 further comprising means for reducing ambiguity in selecting at least one classification category from matching the one or more anchor texts with one or more categories of one or more documents in the classified corpus of hyperlinked web documents.

20. The computer system of claim 19 further comprising means for selecting at least one classification associated with the one or more documents referenced by the one or more anchor texts.