Good websites should be easy to navigate via hyperlinks, yet maintaining a high-quality link structure is difficult. Identifying pairs of pages that should be linked may be hard for human editors, especially if the site is large and changes frequently. Further, given a set of useful link candidates, the task of incorporating them into the site can be expensive, since it typically involves humans editing pages. In the light of these challenges, it is desirable to develop data-driven methods for automating the link placement task. Here we develop an approach for automatically finding useful hyperlinks to add to a website. We show that passively collected server logs, beyond telling us which existing links are useful, also contain implicit signals indicating which nonexistent links would be useful if they were to be introduced. We leverage these signals to model the future usefulness of yet nonexistent links. Based on our model, we define the problem of link placement under budget constraints and propose an efficient algorithm for solving it. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by evaluating it on Wikipedia, a large website for which we have access to both server logs (used for finding useful new links) and the complete revision history (containing a ground truth of new links). As our method is based exclusively on standard server logs, it may also be applied to any other website, as we show with the example of the biomedical research site Simtk.
@cite_3: Given a snapshot of a social network, can we infer which new interactions among its members are likely to occur in the near future? We formalize this question as the link-prediction problem, and we develop approaches to link prediction based on measures for analyzing the “proximity” of nodes in a network. Experiments on large coauthorship networks suggest that information about future interactions can be extracted from network topology alone, and that fairly subtle measures for detecting node proximity can outperform more direct measures. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
@cite_19: Wikipedia’s link structure is a valuable resource for natural language processing tasks, but only a fraction of the concepts mentioned in each article are annotated with hyperlinks. In this paper, we study how to augment Wikipedia with additional high-precision links. We present 3W, a system that identifies concept mentions in Wikipedia text, and links each mention to its referent page. 3W leverages rich semantic information present in Wikipedia to achieve high precision. Our experiments demonstrate that 3W can add an average of seven new links to each Wikipedia article, at a precision of 0.98.
@cite_27: This paper describes how to automatically cross-reference documents with Wikipedia: the largest knowledge base ever known. It explains how machine learning can be used to identify significant terms within unstructured text, and enrich it with links to the appropriate Wikipedia articles. The resulting link detector and disambiguator performs very well, with recall and precision of almost 75 . This performance is constant whether the system is evaluated on Wikipedia articles or "real world" documents. This work has implications far beyond enriching documents with explanatory links. It can provide structured knowledge about any unstructured fragment of text. Any task that is currently addressed with bags of words - indexing, clustering, retrieval, and summarization to name a few - could use the techniques described here to draw on a vast network of concepts and semantics.
@cite_25: In this paper we address the problem of discovering missing hypertext links in Wikipedia. The method we propose consists of two steps: first, we compute a cluster of highly similar pages around a given page, and then we identify candidate links from those similar pages that might be missing on the given page. The main innovation is in the algorithm that we use for identifying similar pages, LTRank, which ranks pages using co-citation and page title information. Both LTRank and the link discovery method are manually evaluated and show acceptable results, especially given the simplicity of the methods and conservativeness of the evaluation criteria.
@cite_12: Wikipedia is the largest monolithic repository of human knowledge. In addition to its sheer size, it represents a new encyclopedic paradigm by interconnecting articles through hyperlinks. However, since these links are created by human authors, links one would expect to see are often missing. The goal of this work is to detect such gaps automatically. In this paper, we propose a novel method for augmenting the structure of hyperlinked document collections such as Wikipedia. It does not require the extraction of any manually defined features from the article to be augmented. Instead, it is based on principal component analysis, a well-founded mathematical generalization technique, and predicts new links purely based on the statistical structure of the graph formed by the existing links. Our method does not rely on the textual content of articles; we are exploiting only hyperlinks. A user evaluation of our technique shows that it improves the quality of top link suggestions over the state of the art and that the best predicted links are significantly more valuable than the 'average' link already present in Wikipedia. Beyond link prediction, our algorithm can potentially be used to point out topics an article misses to cover and to cluster articles semantically.
There is a rich literature on the task of link prediction and recommendation, so rather than trying to be exhaustive, we refer the reader to the excellent survey by Liben Nowell and Kleinberg @cite_3 and to some prior methods for the specific case of Wikipedia @cite_25 @cite_27 @cite_19 @cite_12 , as it is also our main evaluation dataset. The important point to make is that most prior methods base their predictions on the static structure of the network, whereas we focus on how users interact with this static structure by browsing and searching on it.