Content based recommender system by using eye gaze data

Abstract

In this work, we present a proactive content based recommender system that employs web document clustering performed by using eye gaze data. Generally, recommender systems are used in commercial applications, where information about the user's habits and interests are of crucial importance in order to plan marketing strategies, or in information retrieval systems in order to suggest similar resources a user is interested in. Commonly, these systems use explicit relevance feedback techniques (e.g. mouse or keyboard) to improve their performance and to recommend products. In contrast, the proposed system permits to capture user's interest by using implicit relevance feedback, based on data acquired by an eye tracker Tobii T60. The purpose of the system is to collect eye gaze data during web navigation and, by employing clustering techniques, to suggest web documents similar to those that the user, implicitly, expressed greater interest. Performance evaluation was carried out on 30 users and the results show that the proposed system enhanced navigation experience in about 73% of the cases.