Title
To each his own: personalized content selection based on text comprehensibility
Abstract
Imagine a physician and a patient doing a search on antibiotic resistance. Or a chess amateur and a grandmaster conducting a search on Alekhine's Defence. Although the topic is the same, arguably the two users in each case will satisfy their information needs with very different texts. Yet today search engines mostly adopt the one-size-fits-all solution, where personalization is restricted to topical preference. We found that users do not uniformly prefer simple texts, and that the text comprehensibility level should match the user's level of preparedness. Consequently, we propose to model the comprehensibility of texts as well as the users' reading proficiency in order to better explain how different users choose content for further exploration. We also model topic-specific reading proficiency, which allows us to better explain why a physician might choose to read sophisticated medical articles yet simple descriptions of SLR cameras. We explore different ways to build user profiles, and use collaborative filtering techniques to overcome data sparsity. We conducted experiments on large-scale datasets from a major Web search engine and a community question answering forum. Our findings confirm that explicitly modeling text comprehensibility can significantly improve content ranking (search results or answers, respectively).
Year
DOI
Venue
2012
10.1145/2124295.2124325
WSDM
Keywords
Field
DocType
different way,content ranking,major web search engine,text comprehensibility level,different user,search engine,model topic-specific reading proficiency,text comprehensibility,different text,personalized content selection,search result,personalization,user modeling,satisfiability,collaborative filtering,user model,question answering,web search engine,antibiotic resistance,information need
Web search engine,Data mining,World Wide Web,Collaborative filtering,Question answering,Information needs,Ranking,Information retrieval,Computer science,Amateur,User modeling,Personalization
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
20
0.90
31
Authors
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Chenhao Tan162432.85
Evgeniy Gabrilovich24573224.48
Bo Pang35795451.00