Building and applying a concept hierarchy representation of a user profile

A methodology for the construction of a concept hierarchy that takes into account the three basic dimensions of term dependence is presented and a document evaluation function is introduced that allows the use of the concept hierarchy as a user profile for Information Filtering.

Abstract

Term dependence is a natural consequence of language use. Its successful representation has been a long standing goal for Information Retrieval research. We present a methodology for the construction of a concept hierarchy that takes into account the three basic dimensions of term dependence. We also introduce a document evaluation function that allows the use of the concept hierarchy as a user profile for Information Filtering. Initial experimental results indicate that this is a promising approach for incorporating term dependence in the way documents are filtered.