User Modelling for Interactive User-Adaptive Collection Structuring

Automatic structuring is one means to ease access to document collections, be it for organization or for exploration. Of even greater help would be a presentation that adapts to the user’s way of structuring and thus is intuitively understandable. We extend an existing useradaptive prototype system that is based on a growing self-organizing map and that learns a feature weighting scheme from a user’s interaction with the system resulting in a personalized similarity measure. The proposed approach for adapting the feature weights targets certain problems of previously used heuristics. The revised adaptation method is based on quadratic optimization and thus we are able to pose certain contraints on the derived weighting scheme. Moreover, thus it is guaranteed that an optimal weighting scheme is found if one exists. The proposed approach is evaluated by simulating user interaction with the system on two text datasets: one artificial data set that is used to analyze the performance for different user types and a real world data set – a subset of the banksearch dataset – containing additional class information.