NaviSOM: Automatic Construction of Navigational Structure for Web Pages using Self-organizing Maps

Abstract

One major approach for information finding in the WWW is to navigate through some web directories and browse them for the goal pages. However, such directories are generally constructed manually and have disadvantages of narrow coverage and inconsistency. In this work, we propose NaviSOM, a machine learning approach to automatically construct a navigational structure for the WWW. A self-organizing map is constructed to train the web pages and obtain two feature maps, which reveal the relationships among web pages and thematic keywords respectively. We then use these maps to develop a structure that may assist the users finding the information they need. We used a small set of web pages in the experiments and obtained promising result.