QLUE: A Computer Vision Tool for Uniform Qualitative Evaluation of Web Pages

Waleed Hashmi, Moumena Chaqfeh, Lakshminarayanan Subramanian, Yasir Zaki

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

The increasing complexity of the web has attracted a number of solutions to offer optimized versions of web pages that are lighter to process and faster to load. These solutions have been quantitatively evaluated to show significant speed-ups in load times and/or considerable savings in bandwidth/memory consumption. However, while these solutions often produce optimized versions from existing pages, they rarely evaluate the impact of their optimizations on the original content and functionality. Additionally, due to the lack of a unified metric to evaluate the similarity of the pages generated by these solutions in comparison to the original pages, it is not yet possible to fairly compare the results obtained from different user studies campaigns, unless recruiting the exact same users, which is extremely challenging. In this paper, we demonstrate the lack of qualitative evaluation metrics, and propose QLUE (QuaLitative Uniform Evaluation), a tool that automates the qualitative evaluation of web pages generated by web complexity solutions with respect to their original versions using computer vision. QLUE evaluates the content and the functionality of these pages separately using two metrics: QLUE's Structural Similarity, to assess the former, and QLUE's Functional Similarity to assess the latter - a task that is proven to be challenging for humans given the complex functional dependencies in modern pages. Our results show that QLUE computes comparable content and functional scores to those provided by humans. Specifically, 90% of a set of 100 pages were given a similarity score between 90% and 100% by human evaluators, while QLUE shows similar scores for more than 75% of the same pages. In terms of time complexity, QLUE shows that it is capable of evaluating an optimized web page in a few minutes.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationWWW 2022 - Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2022
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery, Inc
Pages2400-2410
Number of pages11
ISBN (Electronic)9781450390965
DOIs
StatePublished - Apr 25 2022
Event31st ACM World Wide Web Conference, WWW 2022 - Virtual, Online, France
Duration: Apr 25 2022Apr 29 2022

Publication series

NameWWW 2022 - Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2022

Conference

Conference31st ACM World Wide Web Conference, WWW 2022
Country/TerritoryFrance
CityVirtual, Online
Period4/25/224/29/22

Keywords

  • Functional Similarity
  • QLUE
  • Structural Similarity
  • Uniform Qualitative Evaluation
  • Web Pages

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computer Networks and Communications
  • Software

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