WebCap: Inferring the user's interests based on a real-time implicit feedback

Abstract

In the context of the personalized information retrieval, this paper presents WebCap, a smart web browser for inferring the user's interests based on a real time implicit feedback. WebCap aims to collect implicitly the relevant documents, during the user's search session by inference of the degree of interest based on a combination of some relevant implicit indicators. The main advantage of our approach is that it does not require any log file. Indeed, WebCap, a browser side tool, calculates the degree of interest in real time and decides if the web page is quite relevant to feed the search history dimension. Our experimental framework, with real users, shows that WebCap can collected implicitly 80% of the relevant documents compared to the explicit approach.