Combining Web Usage and Content Mining for More Effective Personalization

Three common approaches to server-directed automatic Web personalization have been collaborative filtering, content-based filtering, and manual decision rule systems. Recent proposals have suggested Web usage mining as an enabling mechanism to overcome the problems associated with these more traditional techniques. These problems include, for example, the reliance on subjective user ratings or static profiles, and the inability of techniques based on content similarity to capture a richer set of semantic relationships among objects (i.e., pages or products). Yet, usagebased personalization can be problematic when little usage data is available pertaining to some objects or when the site content changes regularly. For more effective personalization, both usage and content attributes of a site must be integrated into a Web mining framework and used by the recommendation engine in a uniform manner. In this paper we present such a framework, distinguishing between the offline tasks of data preparation and mining, and the online process of customizing Web pages based on a user's active session. We describe effective techniques based on clustering to obtain a uniform representation for both site usage and site content profiles. We then show how these profiles can be combined with an active user session to perform real-time personalization.