Novel approaches to acquisition and maintenance of user model

Anton Andrejko

There are many problems related to the Web, e.g. one is overloaded by huge amount of information or a searcher can get lost in information space. These problems can be partially overcome by employing personalization. We focus on the user modeling area and we exploit existing knowledge, mostly from the Adaptive and Semantic Web. We focus on creation and maintenance of the user model. We propose three novel methods for acquisition and maintenance of user characteristics in the user model. The first method is based on generating questions to be used for user model. Particular questions are generated according to the attributes of information concepts that are the subject of the specific application domain. The entire process of asking questions is driven by user defined rules. The second method is based on the content analysis and assumes that comparing attributes of documents, which were found interesting for a user, can be a source for discovering information about user's interests. Moreover, we impute reasons that might have caused user's interest in the content. The third method is based on spreading activation. If there are connections between information concepts of the domain model user's characteristics can be utilized even for concepts that have not been visited yet. The proposed methods were evaluated by means of software tools that were incorporated in research projects.

PDF: Preprint
BIB:

@phdthesis{andrejko2009thesis,
  Author = {Andrejko, Anton},
  Title = {Novel approaches to acquisition and maintenance of user model},
  School = {Slovak University of Technology},
  Address = {Bratislava, Slovakia},
  Year = {2009}
}

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