In this paper, we investigate the exploitation of user profiles defined in social tagging services to personalize Web search. One of the key challenges of a personalization framework is the elicitation of user profiles able to represent user interests. We propose a personalization approach that exploits the tagging information of users within a social tagging service as a way of obtaining their interests. We evaluate this approach in Delicious, a social Web bookmarking service, and apply our personalization approach to a Web search system. Our evaluation results indicate a clear improvement of our approach over related state of the art personalization approaches.
David Vallet, Iván Cantador, Joemon M. Jose