It has been shown that the search personalization can greatly benefit from exploiting user’s short-term context – his immediate needs and focus. But to achieve that, we need to be able to tell when the context changes; we need to be able to divide the user’s activity into segments, where each segment captures user’s single goal and focus. Many different approaches exist, but their major weaknes...

This study reports the results of a pair of user studies that can provide a practical basis for designing an information filtering system that employs implicit feedback for user modeling. In information filtering systems, user modeling can be used to improve the representation of a user’s information needs. User models can be constructed by hand, or learned automatically based on feedback provi...

This paper evaluates the robustness of learning from implicit feedback in web search. In particular, we create a model of user behavior by drawing upon user studies in laboratory and real-world settings. The model is used to understand the effect of user behavior on the performance of a learning algorithm for ranked retrieval. We explore a wide range of possible user behaviors and find that lea...

On the basis of a conceptualization of implicit self-esteem as the implicit attitude toward the self, it was predicted that implicit self-esteem could be enhanced by subliminal evaluative conditioning. In 5 experiments, participants were repeatedly presented with trials in which the word I was paired with positive trait terms. Relative to control conditions, this procedure enhanced implicit sel...

Implicit feedback recommender systems provide personalized suggestions for items that are predicted to be of interest to the user, by collecting online users’ activity and inferring from it users’ preferences. While the state-of-the-art models are built by employing observations of user actions of one single type, the usage of multiple action types enables to observe more information and to bui...

Traditionally, implicit feedback measures are used to evaluate the performance of a particular information retrieval system. This research instead takes a distinctly applied approach to the use of implicit feedback, and extends the inference from aggregate query data to the social and political sciences. Using the three months prior to the 2008 election as a test scenario, the analysis here ass...