Seeking for Clues about Users' Information Needs in Their Navigation

Adaptive navigation systems are tools intended to assist users when they search the Web. Thus, they often have to know the users' current information needs (IN). However, they suffer from the lack of information available about users' IN and the lack of user feedbacks. Accordingly, they have to seek for clues about users' IN in their navigation behaviours. This paper puts forward a method that aims at discovering clues about users' IN in the content of the documents they access without requiring their feedbacks. The paper also presents an incremental method to detect the users' shifts of focus. Eventually, details of an experimentation with real users are outlined and results show that the proposed approach has a good ability to detect the users' shifts. KEYWORDS Implicit interests, information needs, shifts of focus.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: IADIS
• Authors: Jean-Yves Delort
• Keywords: Adaptive Navigation Systems, IADIS 2004, IADIS 2008, Information Needs, User Feedbacks