SiteIF is a personal agent for a bilingual news web site that learns user’s interests from the requested pages. In this paper we propose to use a word sense based document representation as a starting point to build a model of the user’s interests. Documents passed over are processed and relevant senses (disambiguated over WordNet) are extracted and then combined to form a semantic network. A filtering procedure dynamically predicts new documents on the basis of the semantic network.
There are two main advantages of a sense-based approach: first, the model predictions, being based on senses rather than words, are more accurate; second, the model is language independent, allowing navigation in multilingual sites. We report the results of a comparative experiment that has been carried out to give a quantitative estimation of these improvements.
adaptive hypermedia - content-based user modelling - natural language processing - WORDNET
This revised version was published online in July 2005 with corrections to the author name Strapparava.