Semantic Query-manipulation and Personalized Retrieval of Health, Food and Nutrition Information

AbstractSemantic manipulation of website content is important in many domains, but it is critical in some domains, such as health and nutrition. In such domains, users need to retrieve precise, trusted, and relevant health and food information. Even with a high-quality, semantic, Web-based search engine, it is not enough for retrieving the precise health- and nutrition-related information. That is because the retrieved information might not fit the user's specific needs due to the huge amount of information scattered throughout the Web. Thus, semantic query manipulation and personalization techniques will help and guide users in retrieving more relevant health and nutrition information consistent with their needs. In this paper, we present our efforts to develop a framework for semantic query manipulation and personalization of health and nutrition information. We propose a user profile ontology based on culture, language, health and nutrition. The profile is used to enrich the query and to personalize the retrieved health and food information to be consistent with the user's needs. Moreover, we propose query templates that are used for semantic manipulation and mapping of the user's natural language queries into ontology-based queries. We have implemented the proposed framework, and the empirical evaluations show promising improvements in the relevancy of the retrieved results and of the user's satisfaction