Beyond ranked lists in web search: Aggregating web content into topic pages

We investigate the automatic generation of topic pages as an alternative to the current Web search paradigm. Topic pages explicitly aggregate information across documents, filter redundancy, and promote diversity of topical aspects. We propose a novel framework for building rich topical aspect models and selecting diverse information from the Web. In particular, we use Web search logs to build aspect models with various degrees of specificity, and then employ these aspect models as input to a sentence selection method that identifies relevant and non-redundant sentences from the Web. Automatic and manual evaluations on biographical topics show that topic pages built by our system compare favorably to regular Web search results and to MDS-style summaries of the Web results on all metrics employed.