Semantic similarity based trust computation in websites

ABSTRACT

The World Wide Web has evolved at an extreme rate due to its capacity to provide an endless amount of information to the public users. Hence, the user finds himself lost in a pool of information, without knowing what to trust in order to retain. One could rely on the first website links displayed when renowned web search engines such as Google or Yahoo are invoked. However, are those initial displayed links really trustworthy because they came on top of the list? Can one trust specific information by the simple fact that it has been ranked high by virtue of being accessed frequently by other users? In this paper, we propose a method that overcomes the dependency of user.s feedback and allows one to dynamically compute the trust level of a website of a particular domain based on how semantically similar its content is with a trusted website of the same domain. The experimental results have been provided to demonstrate the utility of the proposed method.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.4 Hypertext/Hypermedia
          Subjects: User issues

General Terms:
Human Factors

Keywords:
semantic similarity, trust computation