Human navigation of information networks
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Network navigation constitutes a fundamental human behavior: in order to make use of the information and resources around us, we constantly explore, disentangle, and browse networks such as the Web, social networks, academic paper collections, and encyclopedias, among others. Studying the navigation patterns humans employ is important because it lets us better understand how humans reason about complex networks and lets us build more intuitively navigable and human-friendly information systems. In this dissertation, we study how humans navigate information networks by analyzing tens of thousands of navigation traces harvested from the human-computation game Wikispeedia, where participants are asked to navigate between two given Wikipedia articles in as few clicks as possible. We first shed light on human navigation strategies by describing the anatomy of typical human navigation traces. We then build on these results to develop models and tools for predicting the targets of human paths from only the first few clicks, learning to navigate automatically, and recommending the insertion of important missing hyperlinks. These are useful building blocks for designing more intuitively navigable information spaces and tools to help people find information. The navigation traces collected through the Wikispeedia game have the unique property of being labeled with users' explicit navigation targets. In general, however, humans need not have a precise target in mind when navigating the Web. Records of such navigation traces are abundant in the logs kept by any web server software. We demonstrate the value of passively collected web server logs by presenting an algorithm that leverages such raw logs in order to improve website hyperlink structure. The resulting system is deployed on Wikipedia's full server logs at terabyte scale, producing links that are clicked 12 times as frequently as the average link added by human Wikipedia editors.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Publication date | 2016 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | West, Robert |
|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Computer Science. |
| Primary advisor | Leskovec, Jurij |
| Thesis advisor | Leskovec, Jurij |
| Thesis advisor | Horvitz, Eric J. (Eric Joel) |
| Thesis advisor | Jurafsky, Dan, 1962- |
| Advisor | Horvitz, Eric J. (Eric Joel) |
| Advisor | Jurafsky, Dan, 1962- |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Robert West. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Computer Science. |
| Thesis | Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2016. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2016 by Robert West
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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