Effectiveness of Ambiguity-aware Web Search Algorithm for Mobile Phone

Masafumi Matsuhara

We have proposed a fast Web search method for mobile terminals such as mobile phones. We need to input some terms for Web searching usually. A full QWERTY keyboard is used for input of terms. It is not easy to press the intended key because the key size is small on a mobile phone. Moreover, a user needs to press a few keys per Kana character since one Kana character generally consists of a few alphabets in Japanese. A flick input method has been developed and is used for input of Kana-characters on a touch panel of a smart phone. Because the method needs only about 12 keys, the key size is larger than a full QWERTY keyboard. However, the flick operation is not easy. In our proposed method, a user is able to easily input terms because our proposed method needs only one keystroke per character using only 12 keys without flick operations. Character-strings inputted by the user are ambiguous because each string corresponds to not only the intended term but also other terms. However, the ambiguous strings are not translated into the intended terms in our proposed method. The system based on our proposed method directly searches Web pages by the ambiguous strings and outputs the searched result based on co-occurrence. Thus, we are able to find the intended Web page on a mobile phone rapidly and easily. In the result of the evaluation experiment, the Web search accuracy was 80[%] and the system was able to search Web pages by the correct terms at 90[%]. It was proved that our proposed method was effective for mobile terminals.