Evaluation of Using Human Relationships on the Web as Information Navigation Paths

Abstract

We investigated the use of human relationships on the web for information navigation paths. We propose a new information navigation method that uses personal names. It automatically extracts the human relationships of key people by analyzing the co-occurences of personal names on a web page from search results that are relevant to a specific topic and provides two facilities for using these relationships as information navigation paths. One is information navigation using a list of the key people and a list of related people. Another is information navigation using a network diagram of the key people. We consider human relationships on the web as new information navigation paths like hyperlinks. We analyzed the network structure of human relationships for various topics and evaluated their usefulness in order to clarify the applicable scope and improve the usefulness. The results show that human relationships are adequate shortcut networks for search results for most cases. However, if the ratio of the number of personal names to the number of web pages is too high, the relationships of the people are too tight for information navigation and our future work is to reduce the number of edges without reducing the coverage of search results. If the degree of density of human-related information in the higher ranked search results is too low, human activity is low and our method is not suitable.