User Profile Analysis Using an Online Social Network Integrated Quiz Game

Abstract

User interest profiling is important for personalized web search, recommendation and retrieval systems. In order to develop a good personalized application one needs to have accurate representation of user profiles. Most of the personalized systems generate interest profiles from user declarations or inferred from cookies or visited web pages. But to achieve a certain result that satisfies the user needs, explicit definition of the user interests is needed. In this paper we propose to obtain interest profiles from a quiz game played by the user where at each play he/she is asked 10 questions from different categories with different difficulty levels. The developed quiz game is integrated to Facebook online social network. By doing so, we had the chance to extract each user’s both explicit Facebook interest profiles and implicit interest profiles from quiz game answers. These profiles are used to extract different features for each user. Both implicit interest profile and explicit interest profile features are evaluated for clustering and interest ranking tasks separately. The experimental results show that the implicit interest profile features have promising results on personalized systems.