User Modeling for Building Personalized Web Navigation Assistants

User Modeling for Building Personalized Web Navigation Assistants Abstract: The amount of information that a single user could access has been rapidly increasing with the rapidly growth of the WWW. In order to effectively assist the user in navigating through the sea of information, user modeling is often used to increase the performance of web assistants by addressing the individual user’s preferences and interests. In this paper we proposed several new approaches to extracting features from the user visited web pages for modeling the user’s long- and short-term preferences and interests. The constructed user models are used to build personalized web assistants which help the user navigate the Web by providing interest summarization, related pages suggestion, and highlighting important content in a web page. Our experimental results show that the proposed techniques improve the user’s web browsing experiences significantly. Keywords: The World Wide Web, user modeling, inherited features, personalization, Web navigation assistant Approximate word counts: 6000