HopRank: How semantic structure influences teleportation in PageRank (a case study on bioPortal)

Lisette Espín-Noboa, Florian Lemmerich, Simon Walk, Markus Strohmaier, Mark Musen

Research output: Contribution to Book/Report typesConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract (may include machine translation)

This paper introduces HopRank, an algorithm for modeling human navigation on semantic networks. HopRank leverages the assumption that users know or can see the whole structure of the network. Therefore, besides following links, they also follow nodes at certain distances (i.e., k-hop neighborhoods), and not at random as suggested by PageRank, which assumes only links are known or visible. We observe such preference towards k-hop neighborhoods on BioPortal, one of the leading repositories of biomedical ontologies on the Web. In general, users navigate within the vicinity of a concept. But they also “jump” to distant concepts less frequently. We fit our model on 11 ontologies using the transition matrix of clickstreams, and show that semantic structure can influence teleportation in PageRank. This suggests that users-to some extent-utilize knowledge about the underlying structure of ontologies, and leverage it to reach certain pieces of information. Our results help the development and improvement of user interfaces for ontology exploration.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationThe Web Conference 2019 - Proceedings of the World Wide Web Conference, WWW 2019
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery, Inc
Pages2708-2714
Number of pages7
ISBN (Electronic)9781450366748
DOIs
StatePublished - 13 May 2019
Externally publishedYes
Event2019 World Wide Web Conference, WWW 2019 - San Francisco, United States
Duration: 13 May 201917 May 2019

Publication series

NameThe Web Conference 2019 - Proceedings of the World Wide Web Conference, WWW 2019

Conference

Conference2019 World Wide Web Conference, WWW 2019
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CitySan Francisco
Period13/05/1917/05/19

Keywords

  • Biased random walker
  • BioPortal
  • K-hop neighborhood
  • PageRank

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