Engineering Commons^™

Learning Implicit User Interest Hierarchy For Context In Personalization, Philip K. Chan, Hyoung-Rae Kim

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Faculty Publications

To provide a more robust context for personalization, we desire to extract a continuum of general (long-term) to specific (short-term) interests of a user. Our proposed approach is to learn a user interest hierarchy (UIH) from a set of web pages visited by a user. We devise a divisive hierarchical clustering (DHC) algorithm to group words (topics) into a hierarchy where more general interests are represented by a larger set of words. Each web page can then be assigned to nodes in the hierarchy for further processing in learning and predicting interests. This approach is analogous to building a subject …