Similarity-based algorithm for topic exploration and distillation

The authors attempt to revisit the behaviour of HITS from a different point of view. Namely, a similarity-based analysis model is proposed to observe the distillation procedure. By defining a generalized similarity, an algorithm is presented, which can improve the quality of distillation using only hyperlinks. A topic exploration function is also integrated into the algorithm framework, which enables end-users to search less popular topics when multi-topics are involved in queries. The experimental results reveal two benefits from the new algorithm: the improvement of distillation quality without utilizing any content information of pages, and an additional ability to explore the topics emerging in the query results.