IRC: an iterative reinforcement categorization algorithm for interrelated Web objects

Most existing categorization algorithms deal with homogeneous Web data objects, and consider interrelated objects as additional features when taking the interrelationships with other types of objects into account. However, focusing on any single aspects of these interrelationships and objects does not fully reveal their true categories. In this paper, we propose a categorization algorithm, the iterative reinforcement categorization algorithm (IRC), to exploit the full interrelationships between the heterogeneous objects on the Web. IRC attempts to classify the interrelated Web objects by iterative reinforcement between individual classification results of different types via the interrelationships. Experiments on a clickthrough log dataset from MSN search engine show that, with the Fl measures, IRC achieves a 26.4% improvement over a pure content-based classification method, a 21% improvement over a query metadata-based method, and a 16.4% improvement over a virtual document-based method. Furthermore, our experiments show that IRC converges rapidly.