Distinguishing Topic from Genre

Abstract

Abstract: This paper contributes to a facet from the area of Web Information Retrieval that has recently received much attention: The satisfaction of a user's personal information need with respect to text type, presentation type, or information quality. We imply that such properties can be quantied for all kinds of Web documents, and we subsume them under the term Web genre or genre. Recent surveys show that there is, to a certain degree, a common understanding of Web genre. However, the strictness by which genre and non-genre aspects of a document are experienced is an individual matter. To get a better understanding of the challenges of Web genre identication and its possible limits we investigate in this paper a very interesting question, which has not been posed by now: Given a categorization C of documents (or bookmarks, links, document identiers), can we provide a reliable assessment whether C is governed by topic or by genre considerations? We present instruments to answer this question as well as to make a distinct statement about the homogeneity of a categorization.