AUTOMATIC RESOURCE COMPILATION BY ANALYZING HYPERLINK STRUCTURE AND ASSOCIATED TEXT

We describe the design, prototyping and evaluation of ARC, a system fo r automatically compiling a list of authoritative Web resources on any (sufficiently broad) topic. The goal of ARC is to compile resource li sts similar to those provided by Yahoo! or Infoseek. The fundamental d ifference is that these services construct lists either manually or th rough a combination of human and automated effort, while ARC operates fully automatically. We describe the evaluation of ARC, Yahoo!, and In foseek resource lists by a panel of human users. This evaluation sugge sts that the resources found by ARC frequently fare almost as well as, and sometimes better than, lists of resources that are manually compi led or classified into a topic. We also provide examples of ARC resour ce lists for the reader to examine. (C) 1998 Published by Elsevier Sci ence B.V. All rights reserved.