UP-DRES User Profiling for a Dynamic REcommendation System

Area 01 – Scienze matematiche e informatiche

Research Report n. 1, March 2006. The WWW is actually the most dynamic and attractive information exchange place. Finding useful information is hard due to huge data amount, varied topics and unstructured contents. In this paper we present a web browsing support system that proposes personalized contents. It is integrated in the content management system and it runs on the server hosting the site. It processes periodically site contents, extracting vectors of the most significant words. A topology tree is defined applying hierarchical clustering. During online browsing, viewed contents are processed and mapped in the vector space previously defined. The centroid of these vectors is compared with the topology tree nodes’ centroids to find the most similar; its contents are presented to the user as link suggestions or dynamically created pages. Personal profile is saved after every session and included in the analysis during same user’s subsequent visits, avoiding the cold start problem.

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