Mining Web functional dependencies for flexible information access

We present an approach to enhancing information access through web structure mining in contrast to traditional approaches involving usage mining. Specifically, we mine the hardwired hierarchical hyperlink structure of websites to identify patterns of term-term cooccurrences we call web FDs (functional dependencies). Intuitively, a web FD ‘x → y’ declares that all paths through a site involving a hyperlink labeled x also contain a hyperlink labeled y. The complete set of FDs satisfied by a site help characterize (flexible and expressive) interaction paradigms supported by a site, where a paradigm is the set of explorable sequences therein. We describe algorithms for mining FDs, results from mining several hierarchical websites, and present several interface designs that can exploit such FDs to provide compelling user experiences.