Dynamic enrichment of social users' interests

Abstract

In a social context, the user is more and more an active contributor for producing social information. Then, he needs a tailored information reflecting his current needs and interests in every period of time. This aims to provide a better adaptation while accessing the information space by integrating users' interests dynamic. Indeed, users' interests may change and become “outdated” through time. So, an interest judged as relevant in a period of time may fluctuate in the next period of time. Moreover, analysing the classic user behaviour to deduce his current interests is a difficult task. In fact, his behaviour isn't always reflecting his real interests. In this paper, we propose a new approach for enriching the user profile in an evolutionary environment such as a social network. The enrichment takes into account: i) the social behaviour and more precisely the tagging behaviour (that reflects user's interests) and ii) the temporal information (that reflects the dynamic evolution of users' interests). Our approach focus on the concept of temperature that reflects the importance of a resource in each period of time. This concept is used to infer common interests of users tagging the same “important” resource. The originality of our approach relies on combining information tags, users and resources in a way that guarantees a better enrichment for the social user profile. Our approach has been tested and evaluated with the Delicious social database and shows interesting precision values.