Ontological User Profiles as the Context Model in Web Search

One of the key factors for effective personalization of information access is the user context. Our proposed approach for representing the user context involves implicitly building ontological user profiles by assigning interest scores to existing concepts in a domain ontology. A spreading activation algorithm is used to maintain the interest scores based on the user’s ongoing behavior. Our experimental results show that the user context can be effectively utilized for Web search personalization. Specifically, re-ranking the search results based on interest scores derived from the semantic evidence in an ontological user profile provides better search results by proficiently bringing results closer to the top when they are most relevant to the user.