Interest-based personalized search (original) (raw)

Personalization Techniques for Web Search Results Categorization

2005 IEEE International Conference on e-Technology, e-Commerce and e-Service, 2005

Generic web search is designed to serve all users, independent of the individual needs and without any adaptation to personal requirements. We propose a novel technique 1 that performs post-categorization to the results of popular search engines at the client's side. A user profile is built based on user's choices from a category hierarchy (explicitly given requirements) and user's search history (implicitly logged choices). Caching is utilized in order to provide improved responses. An experimental prototype has been implemented based on results coming from a popular search engine. The experimental results indicate strongly that the proposed mechanism is both effective and efficient.

Implicitly Learning a User Interest Profile for Personalization of Web Search Using Collaborative Filtering

2014 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Joint Conferences on Web Intelligence (WI) and Intelligent Agent Technologies (IAT), 2014

The increasing abundance of content on the web has made information filtering even more important in helping users find information related to their interests. Personalization of web search is one such effort, that aims at improving the efficiency with which a user finds results relevant to his query. This is done by keeping track of a user's individual interests, and taking it into account while returning search results. We propose a robust user modeling technique that implicitly creates a Dynamic Category Interest Tree (DCIT), using a general ontology of the web and a set of web pages collected over time that give an insight into a user's interests. The DCIT is designed to use a fuzzy classification technique to keep track of what topics a user is interested in, his amount of interest in a topic, as well as reflect his changing interests overtime. The DCIT consists of a general ontology of the web, where each node represents a topic and consists of keywords that are usually used to describe that topic or category. Additional keywords that the user frequently associates with a topic, such as names of important people, organizations, or a specialized terminology, etc. are also incorporated into the relevant topic. We use the Apriori Algorithm to extract these associated words from the user's web history in order to more accurately define the user's categories of interest. The DCIT is initially created by a content based approach using only the browsing history of the user, and is later further enhanced through collaborative filtering using the k-nearest neighbour-based algorithm. We propose a technique to re-rank the results from a search engine according to their relevance to a user, based on his implicitly learned DCIT. According to experimental results, our DCIT based ranking often outperforms search engines such as Google when it comes to retrieving web pages that are more relevant to a user's interest.

A Survey on Web Personalization Approaches for Efficient Information Retrieval on User Interests

2015

The web is one of the best sources of information where users can retrieve information based on their queries. Personalized web search is a novel technique which pursues for acquiring user based information more precisely and efficiently. Certain ranking mechanisms and approaches have been developed for generating user profile with or without user involvement. Despite the fact it is unclear that this novel technique works consistently for different users with different queries. This paper presents different strategies and mechanisms developed so far for the efficient retrieval of information based on user interests.

Personalization of Information Retrieval in Different Types of Tasks

In this paper, we propose to personalize search result content through modeling multiple user behavioral measures in different ways as evidence for implicit relevance feedback for different types of search tasks. The point of this personalization is to predict potentially useful documents based on the type of task, and on multiple behaviors indicative of document usefulness. In particular, task type was regarded as the key contextual factor in information retrieval. To represent task types, a faceted classification scheme was used. User interaction behaviors were logged from the clientside for analysis. Both Recursive Partitioning and Logistic Regression methods were employed to identify the most important behavioral signals and to generate the predictive models to predict document usefulness for relevance feedback. Our results demonstrate that combining multiple behaviors on content pages and search result pages can improve the prediction of useful documents. However, different combinations of behavioral measures should be used to predict document usefulness in different task types.

Personalized Search on the World Wide Web

2007

With the exponential growth of the available information on the World Wide Web, a traditional search engine, even if based on sophisticated document indexing algorithms, has difficulty meeting efficiency and effectiveness performance demanded by users searching for relevant information. Users surfing the Web in search of resources to satisfy their information needs have less and less time and patience to formulate queries, wait for the results and sift through them. Consequently, it is vital in many applications -for example in an e-commerce Web site or in a scientific one -for the search system to find the right information very quickly. Personalized Web environments that build models of short-term and long-term user needs based on user actions, browsed documents or past queries are playing an increasingly crucial role: they form a winning combination, able to satisfy the user better than unpersonalized search engines based on traditional Information Retrieval (IR) techniques. Several important user personalization approaches and techniques developed for the Web search domain are illustrated in this chapter, along with examples of real systems currently being used on the Internet.

Category ranking for personalized search

Data & Knowledge Engineering, 2007

Despite the effectiveness of search engines, the persistently increasing amount of web data continuously obscures the search task. Efforts have thus concentrated on personalized search that takes account of user preferences. A new concept is introduced towards this direction; search based on ranking of local set of categories that comprise a user search profile. New algorithms are presented that utilize web page categories to personalize search results. Series of user-based experiments show that the proposed solutions are efficient. Finally, we extend the application of our techniques in the design of topic-focused crawlers, which can be considered an alternative personalized search.

Personalized Web Search via Query Expansion based on User’s Local Hierarchically-Organized Files

2017

Users of Web search engines generally express information needs with short and ambiguous queries, leading to irrelevant results. Personalized search methods improve users' experience by automatically reformulating queries before sending them to the search engine or rearranging received results, according to their specific interests. A user profile is often built from previous queries, clicked results or in general from the user's browsing history; different topics must be distinguished in order to obtain an accurate profile. It is quite common that a set of user files, locally stored in sub-directory, are organized by the user into a coherent taxonomy corresponding to own topics of interest, but only a few methods leverage on this potentially useful source of knowledge. We propose a novel method where a user profile is built from those files, specifically considering their consistent arrangement in directories. A bag of keywords is extracted for each directory from text documents within it. We can infer the topic of each query and expand it by adding the corresponding keywords, in order to obtain a more targeted formulation. Experiments are carried out using benchmark data through a repeatable systematic process, in order to evaluate objectively how much our method can improve relevance of query results when applied upon a third-party search engine.

Subject categorization of query terms for exploring Web users' search interests

Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 2002

Subject content analysis of Web query terms is essential to understand Web searching interests. Such analysis includes exploring search topics and observing changes in their frequency distributions with time. To provide a basis for in-depth analysis of users' search interests on a larger scale, this article presents a query categorization approach to automatically classifying Web query terms into broad subject categories. Because a query is short in length and simple in structure, its intended subject(s) of search is difficult to judge. Our approach, therefore, combines the search processes of real-world search engines to obtain highly ranked Web documents based on each unknown query term. These documents are used to extract cooccurring terms and to create a feature set. An effective ranking function has also been developed to find the most appropriate categories. Three search engine logs in Taiwan were collected and tested. They contained over 5 million queries from different periods of time. The achieved performance is quite encouraging compared with that of human categorization. The experimental results demonstrate that the approach is efficient in dealing with large numbers of queries and adaptable to the dynamic Web environment. Through good integration of human and machine efforts, the frequency distributions of subject categories in response to changes in users' search interests can be systematically observed in real time. The approach has also shown potential for use in various information retrieval applications, and provides a basis for further Web searching studies.

Personalised Information Retrieval: survey and classification

User Modeling and User-adapted Interaction, 2012

Information Retrieval (IR) systems assist users in finding information from the myriad of information resources available on the Web. A traditional characteristic of IR systems is that if different users submit the same query, the system would yield the same list of results, regardless of the user. Personalised Information Retrieval (PIR) systems take a step further to better satisfy the user's specific information needs by providing search results that are not only of relevance to the query but are also of particular relevance to the user who submitted the query. PIR has thereby attracted increasing research and commercial attention as information portals aim at achieving user loyalty by improving their performance in terms of effectiveness and user satisfaction. In order to provide a personalised service, a PIR system maintains information about the users and the history of their interactions with the system. This information is then used to adapt the users' queries or the results so that information that is more relevant to the users is retrieved and presented. This survey paper features a critical review of PIR systems, with a focus on personalised search. The survey provides an insight into the stages involved in building and evaluating PIR systems, namely: information gathering, information representation, personalisation execution, and system evaluation. Moreover, the survey provides an analysis of PIR systems with respect to the scope of personalisation addressed. The survey proposes a classification of PIR systems into three scopes: individualised systems, community-based systems, and aggregate-level systems. Based on the conducted survey, the paper concludes by highlighting challenges and future research directions in the field of PIR.

Web search personalization with ontological user profiles

Proceedings of the sixteenth ACM conference on Conference on information and knowledge management - CIKM '07, 2007

Every user has a distinct background and a specific goal when searching for information on the Web. The goal of Web search personalization is to tailor search results to a particular user based on that user's interests and preferences. Effective personalization of information access involves two important challenges: accurately identifying the user context and organizing the information in such a way that matches the particular context. We present an approach to personalized search that involves building models of user context as ontological profiles by assigning implicitly derived interest scores to existing concepts in a domain ontology. A spreading activation algorithm is used to maintain the interest scores based on the user's ongoing behavior. Our experiments show that re-ranking the search results based on the interest scores and the semantic evidence in an ontological user profile is effective in presenting the most relevant results to the user.