Abstract

The Internet has changed the way people look for information. Users now expect the answers to their questions to be available through a simple web search. Web search engines are increasingly efficient at identifying the best sources for any given keyword query, and are often able to identify the answer within the sources. Unfortunately, many web sources are not trustworthy, because of erroneous, misleading, biased, or outdated information. In many cases, users are not satisfied with —or do not trust — the results from any single source and prefer checking several sources for corroborating evidence. In this paper, we propose methods to aggregate query results from different sources in order to save users the hassle of individually checking query-related web sites to corroborate answers. To return the best aggregated answers to the users, our techniques consider the number, importance, and similarity of the web sources reporting each answer, as well as the importance of the answer within the source. We present an experimental evaluation of our technique on real web queries, comparing the corroborated answers returned with real user clicks. 1.

Citations

275	Snowball: Extracting relations from large plain-text collections - Agichtein, Gravano - 2000
172	Evaluating top-k queries over web-accessible databases - Marian, Bruno, et al.
163	Scaling Question Answering to the Web - Kwok, Etzioni, et al. - 2001
74	Web-scale information extraction in knowitall (preliminary results - Etzioni, Cafarella, et al. - 2004
72	An analysis of the askmsr question-answering system - Brill, Dumais, et al. - 2002
63	Annotating the world wide web using natural language - Katz - 1997
49	Amnon Lotem, and Moni Naor. Optimal aggregation algorithms for middleware - Fagin - 2001
24	Structured querying of web text data: A technical challenge - Cafarella, Re, et al. - 2007
4	Circumventing data quality problems using multiple join paths - Kotidis, Marian, et al. - 2006
3	Information Extraction and Integration: an Overview - Cohen, McCallum - 2004
3	How naga uncoils: searching with entities and relations - Kasneci, Suchanek, et al. - 2007