Enabling Multi-Topic and Cross-Language Browsing Using Web-Semantics Service

Abstract

Mobile web interaction using multiple modalities such as speech, gesture and touch is a well-researched area with examples of multiple framework deployments within the domain. Here, we explore usage of semantics of web content as a new modality for mobile web content discovery and navigation. In addition to semantics-based interactivity, the framework enables dynamic cross-language switching between web pages represented in different languages representing same topics through use of their inherent semantic relations. The approach uses transforming natural web content representations to an intermediate index of latent topic distributions. As the system is semantically indexed, no translation or transliteration techniques are required for cross language switch. The multi-dimensional topic index is built using content-topic distributions which in turn are inferred using supervised topic models. The end-to-end system has been developed as an industrial application with enhanced navigational capability provided as an extension to Samsung Browser v4.0 for Android platform. The service also allows standard browsers to query limited services using the web services RESTful API. The current system provides semantic navigation along with cross-language support for English, Hindi, and Spanish. The semantics based navigation modality, benchmarked against state of the art semantic browsers on objective and usability metrics by users demonstrate the superiority of this system. The cross-language system has been evaluated by language experts for both cross-mapping accuracy as well as relevance order mapping resulting in a subjective cumulative gain score of over 72%.