Predictive Algorithms for Browser Support of Habitual User Activities on the Web

• Published in: Proceedings of the 2005 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence pp. 629 - 635
• Main Authors: Brank, Janez, Frayling, Natasa Milic, Frayling, Anthony, Smyth, Gavin
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: Washington, DC, USA IEEE Computer Society 19.09.2005; IEEE
• Series: ACM Conferences
• Subjects: Algorithm design and analysis; Applied computing > Document management and text processing > Document preparation > Multi > mixed media creation; Character recognition; Computing methodologies > Machine learning; Design optimization; Frequency; History; Human-centered computing > Human computer interaction (HCI) > Interaction paradigms > Hypertext > hypermedia; Information systems > Information retrieval > Evaluation of retrieval results; Information systems > Information retrieval > Users and interactive retrieval > Personalization; Information systems > World Wide Web > Web searching and information discovery > Personalization; Navigation; Pattern analysis; Prediction algorithms; Predictive models; Uniform resource locators
• ISBN: 076952415X; 9780769524153
• DOI: 10.1109/WI.2005.116

Routine user activities on the Web result in the revisitation of Web sites and pages. Standard browser applications provide limited support for this type of habitual behaviour. They typically expose lists of visited URLs that are automatically recorded by the system or manually created by the user, such as bookmarks. Studies have shown that these approaches are not successful in supporting routine user activities. Informed by our user research we designed a browser feature that automatically exposes candidate URLs for revisitation by the user. In this paper we describe and evaluate the algorithms that we use to model the userýs habitual behaviour. We demonstrate how a structured navigation history model facilitates the discovery of relevant usage patterns and supports predictive algorithms that are applicable to relatively short personal navigation histories.