Automatic {W}eb Page Categorization by Link and Context Analysis

Assistance in retrieving documents on the World Wide Web is provided either by search engines, through keyword-based queries, or by catalogues, which organize documents into hierarchical collections. Maintaining catalogues manually is becoming increasingly difficult, due to the sheer amount of material on the Web; it is thus becoming necessary to resort to techniques for the automatic classification of documents. Automatic classification is traditionally performed by extracting the information for representing a document (``indexing'') from the document itself. The paper describes the novel technique of categorization by context, which instead extracts useful information for classifying a document from the context where a URL referring to it appears. We present the results of experimenting with Theseus, a classifier that exploits this technique.