Semantic Representation of a Geo-Social User Profile for a Personalised Information Retrieval

Abstract

The user-centred information retrieval needs to introduce semantics into the user modelling for a meaningful representation of user interests. The semantic representation of the user interests helps to improve the identification of the user’s future cognitive needs. In this paper, we present a semantic-based approach for a personalised information retrieval. This approach is based on the design and the exploitation of a user profile to represent the user and his interests. In this user profile, we combine an ontological semantics issued from WordNet ontology, and a personal semantics issued from the different user interactions with the search system and with his social and situational contexts of his previous searches. The personal semantics considers the co-occurrence relations between relevant components of the user profile as semantic links. The user profile is used to improve two important phases of the information search process: (i) expansion of the initial user query and (ii) adaptation of the search results to the user interests.