Mining user context based on interactive computing for personalized Web search

Abstract

Personalized Web search is an effective means of providing specific results to different users when they submit the same query. How to obtain user's real-time information need is a key issue in personalized search. Existing methods concentrate more on the building user profile based on Web pages/documents which affects the efficiency of search engine. In addition, dynamics of user profile is often ignored. To address this problem, we introduce an approach that captures the user context to accurately provide preferences of users for effective personalized search in this paper. First, short-term query context is generated from Web-snippets to play a role of semantic background of user's search behavior, identifying related concepts of the query. Second, user context snap is built based on query context according to user's interactive search behavior. Finally, evolution of user context is considered by introducing forgetting factor to merge the independent user context snap in a user session. The experimental results fully demonstrate that our approach can successfully build user context according to individual user information need.