Dynamic User Modeling in a System for Personalization of Web Contents

Abstract

This paper presents a system for personalization of web contents based on a user model that stores long term and short term interests. Long term interests are modeled through the selection of categories and keywords for which the user need information. However, user needs change over time as a result of his interaction with received information. For this reason, the user model must be capable of adapting to those shifts in interest. In our case, this adaptation or dynamic modeling is performed by a short term model obtained from user provided feedback. The experiments that have been carried out determine that the combined use of long and short term models performs best when both categories and keywords are used for the long term model.