文脈情報を用いたハイパーテキストのブラウジング支援

抄録

Browsing is one of the most popular ways to gather information in hypertext. The goal of the browsing task is often unclear, and the user's interest may change easily while the browsing. Therefore, techniques of information retrieval cannot be used directly to support the browsing task. However, this type of information gathering is gaining importance as digital libraries or WWW become more widespread. Apart from this, from the educational standpoint, several investigations have reported the significance of information gathering consistent with a learner's interests. In this paper, we propose a method to support the browsing task in hypertext where a user doesn't have clear goal and his/her interest may change easily while the browsing. The method infers the user's interest based on the user's browsing history. The browsing history reflects the user's interest and the user's current interest is formed through the browsing history. In this method, each node should have a set of keywords which describes the content of the node. We call the keywords indexes. Then, the history is described as appearance states of each index. The method calculates current weight of each index based on the appearance states. The weight means the user's interest for the index. Then, the weight of each node is calculated as the sum total of indexes included in the node. This method judges that the heaviest node is the most suitable node for the user's current interest. We have developed a browsing support system with this method for an encyclopedia provided as a CD-ROM. The result of an experimental evaluation of the system is also reported.