doi:10.1093/comjnl/bxh000 Interest Drifts in User Profiling: A Relevance-Based Approach and the Analysis of Scenarios

For personal information agents, user profiles has to represent user interests and preferences in order to satisfy long-term information needs. An implicit assumption in user profiling is the existence of persistent information needs which, however, might suffer some changes over time. Each time the interests of a user change, his profile becomes inaccurate and the predictive quality decreases. Adaptation of user profiles is, therefore, an essential requirement for personal agents that need to be capable of adjusting their behavior quickly in order to shorten the period of reduced predictive quality. In this paper, a user profiling technique named WebProfiler, which learns a hierarchical representation of user interests using conceptual clustering, is augmented with an adaptation strategy based on relevance feedback and time-based forgetting in order to deal with drifting interests. We empirically evaluate the performance of this strategy by analyzing its behavior on multiple scenarios of interest drifts and shifts. 1