Discovery of Web user communities and their role in personalization

One of the major innovations in personalization in the last 20?years was the injection of social knowledge into the model of the user. The user is not considered an isolated individual any more, but a member of one or more communities. User communities have been facilitated by the striking advancements of electronic communications and in particular the penetration of the Web into people??s everyday routine. Communities arise in a number of different ways. Social networking tools typically allow users to proactively connect to each other. Alternatively, data mining tools discover communities of connected Web sites or communities of Web users. In this article, we focus on the latter type of community, which is commonly mined from logs of users?? activity on the Web. We recall how this process has been used to model the users?? interests and personalize Web applications. Collaborative filtering and recommendation are the most widely used forms of community-driven personalization. However, we examine a range of other interesting alternatives that are worth investigating further. This effort leads us naturally to the recent developments on the Web and particularly the advent of the social Web. We explain how this development draws together the different viewpoints on Web communities and introduces new opportunities for community-based personalization. In particular, we propose the concept of active user community and show how this relates to recent efforts on mining social networks and social media.     

Physiology-based personalization of persuasive technology: a user modeling perspective

Persuasive technology (PT) can assist in behavior change. PT systems often rely on user models, based on behavior and self-report data, to personalize their functionalities and thereby increase efficiency. This review paper shows how physiological measurements could be used to further improve user models for personalization of PT by means of bio-cybernetic loops and data-driven approaches. Furthermore, we outline the advantages of using physiological measures for personalization compared to self-report and behavior measurement. Additionally, we show how two types of physiological information—physiological states and physiological reactivity—can be relevant for PT adaptations. To illustrate this, we present a model with two types of physiology-based PT adaptations as part of a bio-cybernetic loop; state-based and reactivity-based. Next, we discuss the implications of physiology-aware PT for persuasive design and theory. And lastly, because of the potential impact of such systems, we also consider important ethical implications of physiology-aware PT.

     

Web personalization for user acceptance of technology: An empirical investigation of E-government services

E-Commerce firms have adopted Web Personalization techniques extensively in the form of recommender systems for influencing user behavior for customer retention. Although there are numerous studies in this area, academic research addressing the role of Web Personalization in user acceptance of technology is very scant. Further, owing to the potential of recommender systems to attract and retain customers, most studies in web personalization have been done in E-Commerce setting. In this research, the ‘Consumer Acceptance and Use of Information Technology’ theory proposed in previous research has been extended to include web personalization as a moderator and has been tested in an E-Government context. Data collection involved conducting a laboratory experiment with the treatment group receiving personalized web forms for requesting an E-Government service. Our analyses show that personalizing the Web by self-reference and content relevance has a significant moderator role in influencing the relationship between determinants of intention to use and behavioral intention in certain cases.     

个性化服务中基于用户聚类的协同过滤推荐

协同过滤技术被成功地应用于个性化推荐系统中，但随着系统规模扩大，它的效能逐渐降低。针对此缺点，使用了基于用户聚类的协同过滤推荐，根据用户评分的相似性对用户聚类，在此基础上搜索目标用户的最近邻居，从而缩小用户的搜索范围。本文还提出将协同过滤推荐分为类内相似系数计算和产生推荐两个阶段，把相似系数的计算放在离线部分，减少在线推荐的计算量，提高实时响应速度。另对聚类算法初始聚类中心的选取也做了改进。     

基于前后端日志记录的个性化推荐系统

为了有效地吸引和留住用户,提高网站服务的质量,在原有个性化实现技术基础上,提出了一种前后端日志相结合的方式存取用户浏览信息,对用户浏览站点的行为进行跟踪,为Web日志挖掘提供更精确有效的信息.结合前后端日志记录相结合的策略,提出了一个可伸缩的,独立于具体Web站点的页面推荐系统架构.实验分析结果表明,该方式能更准确全面的收集用户数据,同时个性化模块以一种非侵入的方式与系统集成,提高了系统的灵活性,方便系统重用.     

个性化服务中用户近期兴趣视图的生成

随着时间和环境的改变,Web用户的兴趣也会随之改变,在信息服务中应该能捕获到用户的这种近期兴趣变化以便能为用户提供更好的个性化服务。对现在描述网页的特征片技术中的关键词权重的计算做了改进以更加准确地描述网页,给出了利用行为分析得到网页兴趣度的方法,进而给出了根据某领域的标准分类树形成网页分类树,并最终生成能准确表示用户近期兴趣的兴趣视图的新方法。以此进行个性化推荐也更加有效。     

An architecture to support scalable online personalization on the Web

Online personalization is of great interest to e-companies. Virtually all personalization technologies are based on the idea of storing as much historical customer session data as possible, and then querying the data store as customers navigate through a web site. The holy grail of online personalization is an environment where fine-grained, detailed historical session data can be queried based on current online navigation patterns for use in formulating real-time responses. Unfortunately, as more consumers become e-shoppers, the user load and the amount of historical data continue to increase, causing scalability-related problems for almost all current personalization technologies. This paper chronicles the development of a real-time interaction management system through the integration of historical data and online visitation patterns of e-commerce site visitors. It describes the scientific underpinnings of the system as well as its architecture. Experimental evaluation of the system shows that the caching and storage techniques built into the system deliver performance that is orders of magnitude better than those derived from off-the-shelf database components. Received: 30 October 2000 / Accepted: 19 December 2000 Published online: 27 April 2001     

Eliciting user preferences through a guided design personalization process

In building industry, sound methods are needed to determine the design options that respond to the requirements of the potential house buyers. A new method is presented that consists of two main concepts: a user centred design approach through a non-designers interface and Bayesian networks for learning the housing preferences and responding to design choices. In a design session, the network is used to collect data about the housing preferences and to check for design inconsistencies. An experiment with the system in a housing project shows how the subjects responded to the system feedback on their design decisions.     

PIPE: Web personalization by partial evaluation

Partial evaluation is a technique popular in the programming languages community. It is applied here as a methodology for personalizing Web content. PIPE (Personalization is Partial Evaluation) is able to personalize Web resources, without enumerating the interaction sequences beforehand. It supports information integration, and varying levels of input by Web visitors. PIPE models personalization as a form of partial evaluation, a technique that uses incomplete input information to specialize programs. This article describes the PIPE methodology and presents experimental results demonstrating its effectiveness in two different domains     

Transportation ontology definition and application for the content personalization of user interfaces

Ontologies have been largely exploited in many domains and studies. In this paper, we present a new application of a domain ontology for generating personalized user interfaces for transportation interactive systems. The concepts, relationships and axioms of transportation ontology are exploited during the semi-automatic generation of personalized user interfaces. Personalization deals with the capacity of adaptation of a user interface, reflecting what is known about the user and the domain application. It can be performed on the interface container presentation (e.g., layout, colors, sizes) and in the content provided in their input/output (e.g., data, information, document). In this paper, the transportation ontology is used to provide the content personalization. This paper presents the ontology and how it is used for the personalization of user interfaces for developing transportation interactive systems by model-driven engineering.     

Helping online customers decide through Web personalization

The Web-based personalization system proposed here uses both collaborative filtering and Web usage mining to give online shoppers the personalized recommendations they need to purchase products more intelligently.     

Web personalization: is it effective?

By knowing their customers' needs better, firms can offer products and services at the right price, in the right context, and at the right time. Web personalization enables this sort of interaction. Firms can implement personalization by integrating independent packages such as data mining and collaborative filtering tools with the Web server; or personalization could take the form of a package solution. In general, Web personalization serves three main objectives: It draws attention to a company and its products and services; implants messages; and attempts to persuade. The study presented provides empirical support that Web personalization can motivate users to consider agent-recommended items.     

Mediation of user models for enhanced personalization in recommender systems

Provision of personalized recommendations to users requires accurate modeling of their interests and needs. This work proposes a general framework and specific methodologies for enhancing the accuracy of user modeling in recommender systems by importing and integrating data collected by other recommender systems. Such a process is defined as user models mediation. The work discusses the details of such a generic user modeling mediation framework. It provides a generic user modeling data representation model, demonstrates its compatibility with existing recommendation techniques, and discusses the general steps of the mediation. Specifically, four major types of mediation are presented: cross-user, cross-item, cross-context, and cross-representation. Finally, the work reports the application of the mediation framework and illustrates it with practical mediation scenarios. Evaluations of these scenarios demonstrate the potential benefits of user modeling data mediation, as in certain conditions it allows improving the quality of the recommendations provided to the users.

面向个性化服务的网页特征描述

个性化服务研究核心点在于准确描述用户兴趣,即对用户访问过并感兴趣的网页进行准确描述。现今对网页特征描述方法还未有系统的研究。针对网页特征描述中涉及的特征抽取范围,特征词规范化及词语权重计算3方面内容进行了分析研究,将改进后的新方法应用于个性化服务系统时取得了较好的信息推荐效果。     

基于行为的Web用户满意模型*

在激烈的商业竞争中, 努力使得用户满意是企业成功的根本保证之一。分析用户对产品以及服务的满意情况对产品的改进具有直接推动作用,但是在复杂多变的网络环境下,基于用户主观打分的满意分析方法和理论在时效性及灵活性上存在不足。提出了一个基于行为的Web用户满意模型, 以Web访问日志为数据来源,通过分析用户的访问行为来研究用户的客观满意。此模型针对分析对象实时获取、分析用户的访问信息和客观满意情况,保证了较好的时效性和灵活性。     

Web user profiles with time-decay and prototyping

User profiling represents an important initial step in personalizing web services and in building recommendation systems. Non-invasive profiling methods monitor users’ behavior and infer interest profiles from their past actions. Most existing profiling methods, which relate the users’ interests to a given ontology, consider only the user’s past actions when calculating his/her profile. The profiling algorithms use a time-decay function for users’ past actions to adapt the profile to shifts in the user’s interests over time. In our work, we propose a hybrid method that combines time-decay and profile correction using prototype profiles. The additional profile correction step considers the interests of similar users and expands the interest scores beyond the concepts detected in the user’s past actions, which facilitates faster profile adaptation to the user’s new interests. In our experimental work, we experimented extensively with two real data sets: data of an online advertising network and student data in an online e-learning environment. We measured the quality of the computed user profiles by correlating them to users’ future actions. Experiments revealed that it is crucial to build the user’s profile using a large number of events from his/her past and to update the profile regularly. When we are unable to do so, the profile correction can be used to keep the quality of the profile from dropping too low. The results show that our method significantly outperforms existing ontological profiling methods.     

基于多重特征的双层Web用户聚类方法

通过对Web日志的聚类分析,可以发现用户的群体特征,甚至可以预测用户将来的访问模式,进而为不同的用户群提供个性化服务。针对现有方法的一般缺陷,包括特征选择单一无法充分体现用户兴趣偏好和传统Hierarchical算法在用户聚类时存在的收敛效率低、易受用户访问多样性影响的问题,提出了基于多重特征的双层用户聚类方法。该方法采用多重特征对用户相似性进行度量,并在此基础上进行双层聚类。首先采用基于密度的DBSCAN算法来排除用户会话中的离群对象和发现不规则簇,然后再采用自底向上的Hierarchical方法对第一层的聚类结果进行聚类。实验结果表明,本文方法具有良好的稳定性和聚类效果。