User Interests Modeling in Online Forums

This paper studies the problem of user modeling in online forums from a personality viewpoint. A novel hierarchical user profiling mechanism is proposed, which utilizes the user-generated content, the reply relations among users and the topics of the discussions. The hierarchical model represent the users´ interests across different topics. The obtained user profiles are applied to three forum-related tasks: new discussions recommendation, external news articles recommendation and user retrieval. The experimental results show that, comparing with the traditional methods, the hierarchical user profiling approach achieves a better performance in all three tasks.