An improved contextual advertising matching approach based on Wikipedia knowledge

The current boom of the Web is associated with the revenues originated from Web advertising. As one prevalent type of Web advertising, contextual advertising refers to the placement of the most relevant commercial textual ads within the content of a Web page, so as to provide a better user experience and thereby increase the revenues of Web site owners and an advertising platform. Therefore, in contextual advertising, the relevance of selected ads with a Web page is essential. However, some problems, such as homonymy and polysemy, low intersection of keywords and context mismatch, can lead to the selection of irrelevant textual ads for a Web page, making that a simple keyword matching technique generally gives poor accuracy. To overcome these problems and thus to improve the relevance of contextual ads, in this paper we propose a novel Wikipedia-based matching technique which, using selective matching strategies, selects a certain amount of relevant articles from Wikipedia as an intermediate semantic reference model for matching Web pages and textual ads. We call this technique SIWI: Selective Wikipedia Matching, which, instead of using the whole Wikipedia articles, only matches the most relevant articles for a page (or a textual ad), resulting in the effective improvement of the overall matching performance. An experimental evaluation is conducted, which runs over a set of real textual ads, a set of Web pages from the Internet and a dataset of more than 260 000 articles from Wikipedia. The experimental results show that our method performs better than existing matching strategies, which can deal with the matching over the large dataset of Wikipedia articles efficiently, and achieve a satisfactory contextual advertising effect. Copyright © 2011 The Author. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The British Computer Society. All rights reserved.