Mining interests for user profiling in electronic conversations

The increasing amount of Web-based tasks is currently requiring personalization strategies to improve the user experience. However, building user profiles is a hard task, since users do not usually give explicit information about their interests. Therefore, interests must be mined implicitly from electronic sources, such as chat and discussion forums. In this work, we present a novel method for topic detection from online informal conversations. Our approach combines: (i) Wikipedia, an extensive source of knowledge, (ii) a concept association strategy, and (iii) a variety of text-mining techniques, such as POS tagging and named entities recognition. We performed a comparative evaluation procedure for searching the optimal combination of techniques, achieving encouraging results. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.