Modeling User Knowledge from Queries: Introducing a Metric for Knowledge

The user's knowledge plays a pivotal role in the usability and experience of any information system. Based on a semantic network and query logs, this paper introduces a metric for users' knowledge on a topic. The finding that people often return to several sets of closely related, well-known, topics, leading to certain concentrated, highly activated areas in the semantic network, forms the core of this metric. Tests were performed determining the knowledgeableness of 32,866 users on in total 8 topics, using a data set of more than 6 million queries. The tests indicate the feasibility and robustness of such a user-centered indicator.