Enhanced Personalized Search using Social Data

Search personalization that considers the social dimension of the web has attracted a significant volume of research in recent years. A user profile is usually needed to represent a user’s interests in order to tailor future searches. Previous research has typically constructed a profile solely from a user’s usage information. When the user has only limited activities in the system, the effect of the user profile on search is also constrained. This research addresses the setting where a user has only a limited amount of usage information. We build enhanced user profiles from a set of annotations and resources that users have marked, together with an external knowledge base constructed according to usage histories. We present two probabilistic latent topic models to simultaneously incorporate social annotations, documents and the external knowledge base. Our web search strategy is achieved using personalized social query expansion. We introduce a topical query expansion model to enhance the search by utilizing individual user profiles. The proposed approaches have been intensively evaluated on a large public social annotation dataset. Results show that our models significantly outperformed existing personalized query expansion methods which use user profiles solely built from past usage information in personalized search.