An N-Gram Based Approach to Automatically Identifying Web Page Genre

The research reported in this paper is the first phase of a larger project on the automatic classification of web pages by their genres, using n-gram representations of the web pages. In this study, the textual content of web pages is used to create feature sets consisting of the most frequent n-grams and their associated frequencies. We present three methods, each of which uses a distance measure to determine the dissimilarity between two feature sets. Each method forms a feature set for every web page in the test set, however the formation of feature sets from the training set differs between methods: we experiment using one feature set per web page, per genre, and a combination of genre-based feature sets supplemented by subgenre feature sets. We present results for a balanced corpus of seven genres (blog, eshop, FAQs, front page, listing, home page, and search page). Initial results are encouraging.