1 Introduction

Two widely-known research areas investigating document segmentation are proximity measurement and passage retrieval [2]. Proximity measurement considers the distance between queried words within the same document; on the other hand, passage retrieval can be viewed as a type of proximity measure, which mainly investigates how to segment a document into smaller units (termed passages) and returns only the most relevant passages to users rather than the whole document. Although the area of passage retrieval has been widely investigated, some issues need to be considered. For example, an appropriate indexing method has to be chosen, as it can be slow due to the larger number of passages compared to documents [8]. Moreover, it may not be suitable for very long queries as there is a low possibility that short passages can match many queried words [3].

2 Proximity Within Paragraph

Based on the concept of article writing in which authors usually arrange associated ideas together, PWP considers the occurrence of unique queried words and determines relevance through the proximity of these words enclosed in the same paragraph (called logical block hereafter). The process of PWP can be divided into three steps as below.

1) Query Analysis: this procedure mainly concerns how to assign a weight to each unique queried word. In this experiment, an equal weight is employed; however, different weighting schemes can be applied instead, such as user-specified weights.

2) Logical Block Identification: as previous research mainly focuses on a typical document, PWP addresses how to separate HTML documents into blocks with the use of seven HTML tags which are title, paragraph, headers, table, unordered list, ordered list, and horizontal rule.

3) Similarity Value Calculation: the occurrences of queried words inside each block are located and a score is then assigned to each block with respect to the number of unique queried words. Let be the weight of a queried term , the number of unique queried words in a query , the number of unique queried words in a logical block , the total weight of all queried words, the number of logical blocks within a document, and the score of . The scoring scheme of PWP is shown as follows.

procedure Similarity Value Calculation 


(1) for each queried term  in a query,  


(2) initial score of each logical block  


(3) for each logical block  


                 (4) if all  appear in  then  


                                 else  


(5) the score of  is 


                                 PWP score 


end procedure

3 Experiment

The effectiveness of PWP is compared to Minimum Distance Between Queried Pair (MQP), employed as a part of Inquirus [6]. The MQP score of a document is calculated as follows.

(1)

where is the minimum distance between queried words -th and -th, the number of unique queried words in a document, and a constant specifying the maximum useful distance between queried words. To compare the effectiveness of both methods, a test system was constructed from three test sets based on the WT10G dataset provided from TREC, and 50 short queries created from the titles and descriptions of Topics 501-550. Each test set comprises three underlying engines; Test Set 1 comprises fub01be2, JuruFull and ricMM; Test Set 2 includes Ntvenx2, PDWTAHDR and uwmtaw1; finally, icadhoc2, irtLnua and uncfsls are chosen for Test Set 3. Two criteria are employed to evaluate the effectiveness: the average interpolated precision-recall (AvgPrec) [1] and the average Discounted Cumulative Gain (AvgDCG) [5]. AvgPrec measures the accuracy of a retrieval strategy to order relevant documents toward the top rank, where AvgDCG assesses the effort spent by users to gain knowledge from result lists.

The experiment further investigates whether a combination of PWP and MQP, known as PROX hereafter, can improve the effectiveness as research has shown that a combination of similarity values from different retrieval strategies yield considerable improvement [4,7]. In this experiment, CombSUM [4], the sum of individual similarity values, is employed to combine the scores of both methods. The effectiveness of PWP, MQP and PROX is demonstrated in Table 1.

4 Discussion

From Table 1, the results are not consistent as PWP sometimes provides lower AvgPrec and AvgDCG. This can be explained that MQP considers only the distances between all pairs of queried words; as a result, if a particular document contains only one out of many queried words, this document will be assigned a score of zero, as there is no distance between queried words. This situation may occur when users have no knowledge regarding the topics for which they are searching, they may enter words which are not related to or commonly used in the topics; for example, users may search for ``cloud and silhouette'' rather than ``cloud and formation''. In contrast, PWP looks at both the number of unique queried words and the occurrence of these words; therefore in the same situation PWP will assign scores to a document with respect to the occurrence of each word and its position.

Another limitation of MQP is that it tends to give equal scores to documents as it only takes into account the average minimum distance of queried words; as a consequence, it is difficult to rank many documents which obtain an equal score. An example of such is the name of an organization, such as ``Federal Housing Administration''. PWP can mitigate this limitation by assigning higher scores to documents containing more occurrences of queried words in different blocks.

Having alleviated the limitations of MQP, PWP has a restriction regarding multiple-topic documents, which tend to be longer and have more logical blocks compared to single-topic documents. Due to this, pages with multiple-topics are likely to obtain low scores from PWP even though their content covers a searched topic. This is mainly caused by PWP using the maximum possible score to normalize the raw score; hence, scores of related blocks will be reduced by the weight of unrelated blocks. On the other hand, MQP is not affected by multiple-topic documents due to consideration of only one occurrence of the queried-word set. Another limitation of PWP is that it could obtain lower AvgDCG values than MQP because PWP considers both the number of unique queried words and the number of their occurrences.

Table 1 further demonstrates that PROX generally provides significant improvement compared with PWP and MQP on their own, as the combination merges the advantages of both strategies. Consider the example shown in Table 2, where it can be seen that obtains the highest score from MQP but the lowest from PWP. This means that the distance among queried words of is the shortest compared with the others but the number of occurrences is the lowest. On the other hand, having the highest relevant judgment, is ranked second by both MQP and PWP. Once the similarity values are combined, the rank of is increased first due to a higher frequency of its occurrence, although the value of its average minimum distance is lower than .

Table 2: Example of a combination between MQP and PWP

MQP			PWP			MQP+PWP
ID	Score	Rel	ID	Score	Rel	ID	Score	Rel
	0.95	0		0.84	1		1.54	2
	0.78	2		0.76	2		1.49	1
	0.65	1		0.41	0		1.36	0

5 Conclusion

PWP linearly combines scores of all logical blocks with the use of maximum normalization to represent a final document score, and the whole document is presented to users. Although PWP has limitations, it can alleviate the limitations of MQP and a combination of both can significantly improve the effectiveness, thus supporting previous research.

6 Acknowledgments

This work is partly supported by the Royal Thai Government through a studentship of S. Palakvangsa-Na-Ayudhya.