Predicting user interests from contextual information

Abstract

Search and recommendation systems must include contextual information to effectively model users' interests. In this paper, we present a systematic study of the effectiveness of five variant sources of contextual information for user interest modeling. Post-query navigation and general browsing behaviors far outweigh direct search engine interaction as an information-gathering activity. Therefore we conducted this study with a focus on Website recommendations rather than search results. The five contextual information sources used are: social, historic, task, collection, and user interaction. We evaluate the utility of these sources, and overlaps between them, based on how effectively they predict users' future interests. Our findings demonstrate that the sources perform differently depending on the duration of the time window used for future prediction, and that context overlap outperforms any isolated source. Designers of Website suggestion systems can use our findings to provide improved support for post-query navigation and general browsing behaviors.