ARTICLE IN PRESS

Information Systems 31 (2006) 247265

www.elsevier.com/locate/infosys

Modeling user interests by conceptual clustering

Daniela Godoy,1, Anala Amandi1
ISISTAN Research Institute, UNICEN University Campus Universitario, Tandil (7000), Buenos Aires, Argentina
Received 18 January 2005; received in revised form 18 January 2005; accepted 20 February 2005

Abstract

As more information becomes available on the Web, there has been a crescent interest in effective personalization
techniques. Personal agents providing assistance based on the content of Web documents and the user interests emerged
as a viable alternative to this problem. Provided that these agents rely on having knowledge about users contained into
user proles, i.e., models of user preferences and interests gathered by observation of user behavior, the capacity of
acquiring and modeling user interest categories has become a critical component in personal agent design. User proles
have to summarize categories corresponding to diverse user information interests at different levels of abstraction in
order to allow agents to decide on the relevance of new pieces of information. In accomplishing this goal, document
clustering offers the advantage that an a priori knowledge of categories is not needed, therefore the categorization is
completely unsupervised. In this paper we present a document clustering algorithm, named WebDCC (Web Document
Conceptual Clustering), that carries out incremental, unsupervised concept learning over Web documents in order to
acquire user proles. Unlike most user proling approaches, this algorithm offers comprehensible clustering solutions
that can be easily interpreted and explored by both users and other agents. By extracting semantics from Web pages,
this algorithm also produces intermediate results that can be nally integrated in a machine-understandable format such
as an ontology. Empirical results of using this algorithm in the context of an intelligent Web search agent proved it can
reach high levels of accuracy in suggesting Web pages.
r 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Personal information agents; Conceptual clustering; Ontology learning

1. Introduction interests offer users an alternative to cope with the

Agents personalizing information-related tasks
based on the content of documents and the user
Corresponding author. Tel./fax: +54 2293 440362.
E-mail addresses: dgodoy@exa.unicen.edu.ar (D. Godoy),
amandi@exa.unicen.edu.ar (A. Amandi).
1
Also at CONICET.
vast amount of information available on the Web.
Due to this fact, personal information agents have
been intensively used in the last years to accom-
plish several tasks, such as searching, ltering and
summarizing information on behalf of a user or
community of users [1]. A critical component for
these agents is their capacity to acquire and model
user interest categories into user proles. As

0306-4379/$ - see front matter r 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.is.2005.02.008
 ARTICLE IN PRESS
248 D. Godoy, A. Amandi / Information Systems 31 (2006) 247265
proles allow agents to categorize documents
based on the features they exhibit, even when it
is not possible for them to assess the full meaning
of documents, agent effectiveness depends on
prole completeness and accurateness.
A personal agent has not only to summarize
categories corresponding to diverse user informa-
tion interests into a user prole (e.g., interests
related to their hobbies, like sports or movies, or to
their work, like politics), but also to describe user
experiences in each of these categories at different
levels of abstraction (e.g., a user interest in skying
may respond to a more general interest in winter
sports, or even in just sports). A hierarchical view
of user interests enhances the semantics of user
proles as it is much closer to the human
conception of a set of interests. By assessing
comprehensible user proles, agents become able
to communicate representations of user interests to
either users for explanation or exploration pur-
poses, and other agents to establish a cooperative
behavior in an agent community. Learning mean-
ingful user proles involves the extraction of
semantics from a group of Web pages a user reads
in a personal fashion.
Extracting semantics from resources found on
the syntactic Web is an essential step in ontology
learning approaches for the Semantic Web [2].
Semantic Web aims at extending the current Web
with machine-processable semantics, allowing var-
ious intelligent services to understand the informa-
tion and to have a better access to it. Central to the
Semantic Web is the concept of ontology, which is
a conceptualization of a domain that enables
agents to reason about Web content and carry
out intelligent tasks on behalf of users. In this
context, ontology learning refers to the semi-
automatic extraction of semantics from the Web
in order to create an ontology [3]. Integrated in an
ontology learning process, a user proling ap-
proach discovering semantics from Web pages can
contribute to build ontologies for the Semantic
Web.
In this paper we propose a document clustering
algorithm belonging to the conceptual clustering
paradigm, named WebDCC (Web Document
Conceptual Clustering), that carries out incremen-
tal, unsupervised concept learning over Web
documents in order to acquire comprehensible
user proles. Being a conceptual clustering ap-
proach, this algorithm not only performs cluster-
ing but also characterization, i.e., the formation of
intentional concept descriptions for each exten-
sionally dened cluster. Algorithms in this para-
digm, have been recognized as a powerful machine
learning method to nd potentially interesting
concepts and relations in ontology learning for the
Semantic Web [46]. It is worth noticing that,
although the knowledge acquired during user
proling can foster ontology learning, the Seman-
tic Web is expected to be only of partial benet to
the problem of formulating explicit user proles. A
domain ontology can only capture concepts which
are shared by a community of users, but these
concepts are not specic enough to reect the
interest of individual users.
This paper is organized as follows. Section 2
presents the WebDCC algorithm and its principal
components. An overview of the datasets used for
experiments is given in Section 3. Section 4
compares WebDCC results with those obtained
with a traditional hierarchical clustering algo-
rithm. An experience of using WebDCC for user
proling in a Web search agent is described in
Section 5. Section 6 places this work in the context
of related ones. Finally, concluding remarks and
future lines of research are described in Section 7.
2. WebDCC algorithm overview
Algorithms belonging to the conceptual cluster-
ing paradigm, rst introduced by [7], include not
only clustering, but also characterization. More
formally, conceptual clustering is dened as the
task of, given a sequential presentation of in-
stances and their associated descriptions, nding
clusterings that group these instances into con-
cepts or categories, a summary description of each
concept and a hierarchical organization of them
[8]. In this section, we briey describe each of these
elements in the context of WebDCC algorithm.
Instances in our algorithm correspond to vector
representations of Web pages according to the
vector space model [9]. In this model, each
document is identied by a feature vector in a

D. Godoy, A. Amandi / Information Systems 31 (2006) 247265
space in which each dimension corresponds to a
distinct term associated with a numerical value or
weight indicating its importance. The resulting
representation of a Web page is, therefore,
equivalent to a t-dimensional vector:
d i ht1 ; w1 ; t2 ; w2 ; . . . ; tt ; wt i,
where wj represents the weight of the term tj in the
instance or document d i : Before obtaining a
document representation, non-informative words
such as prepositions, conjunctions, pronouns and
very common verbs are removed by using a
standard stop-word list. After stop-word removal
a stemming algorithm is applied to the remaining
words in order to reduce the variant forms of a
word to a common one. In the experiments
reported in this paper, terms were stemmed using
the Porter stemming algorithm [10].
Instances obtained by extracting feature vectors
from documents are incrementally given to the
WebDCC algorithm, which is concerned with
building hierarchies of concepts starting from
them. A conceptual hierarchy is a classication
tree where internal nodes represent concepts and
leaf nodes represent clusters of instances. The
hierarchy root corresponds to the most general
concept, which summarizes all instances the
algorithm has seen, while inner concepts become
increasingly specic as they are placed lower in the
hierarchy, covering only subsets of instances by
themselves. In turn, terminal concepts are those
with no further child concepts.
In other words, a hierarchy consists of an
arbitrary number of concepts, denoted by C
politics 0.9
government 0.9
elections 0.8
campaign 0.6
Politics
football 0.9
cup
FIFA
Fig. 1. A concept hierarchy illustrating knowledge representation in WebDCC.
ARTICLE IN PRESS
249
fc1 ; c2 ; . . . ; cn g; which are gradually discovered by
the algorithm as new instances become available.
In order to automatically assign instances to
concepts, the algorithm associates to each of them
a description given by a set of terms, ci
ht1 ; w1 ; . . . ; tm ; wm i; weighted according to their
importance in the concept summarization. Fig. 1
shows an example of a hierarchical clustering
solution which is possible to achieve with the
WebDCC algorithm. Labels were added to con-
cepts in the gure for illustrative purpose only.
However, a concept description generated by the
clustering algorithm consists only of a set of terms.
At this point, we need to make a distinction
between concepts and categories as they will be
used in this work. A category is considered to be
any set of instances, while a concept is the internal
representation of a category. Consider the algo-
rithm has discovered the concept sports within a
set of instances. In which case, the concept itself
will be a description, such as csports hsports; 0:9;
team; 0:9; score; 0:8i which summarizes the
category sports, composed by all the instances
the algorithm has seen belonging to this concept.
Leaves in the hierarchy correspond to clusters of
instances belonging to all ancestor concepts.
Intuitively, clusters correspond to groups of
instances whose members are more similar to one
another than to the members of other clusters, so
that clusters group highly similar instances ob-
served by the algorithm. In general terms, a set of
ni instances or documents belonging to a concept
ci and denoted by Di fd 1 ; d 2 ; . . . ; d ni g; is orga-
nized into a collection of k clusters, S ji
User Interest Hierarchy
Everything
sports 0.9
team 0.9
score 0.8 User Interest Concepts
Sports
0.9 basketball 1.0
0.8 NBA 0.9
Football Basketball
Clusters of Intances
(Experiences)
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250 D. Godoy, A. Amandi / Information Systems 31 (2006) 247265
fs1i ; s2i ; . . . ; ski g; containing elements of Di such
that sli \ spi ;; 8lap:
WebDCC integrates classication and learning
by sorting each instance through the concept
hierarchy and simultaneously updating it. Upon
encountering a new instance, the algorithm in-
corporates it below the root of the existing
hierarchy and then recursively compares the
instance to each child concept as it descends the
tree. Below a given concept, the algorithm
considers incorporating the instance into a cluster
belonging to this concept as well as creating a new
singleton cluster. Finally, the possibility of a new
concept creation is evaluated in order to expand
the conceptual hierarchy in depth.
WebDCC, which is dened in Algorithm 1,
takes as input a hierarchy H and a new instance
d new ; and returns an updated hierarchy H 0 result-
ing from the addition of d new to H. Learning takes
place as instances are sorted through the hierarchy
of incrementally discovered concepts. The rst
time the algorithm is run a concept croot with no
associated description is used to initialize the
hierarchy, allowing every instance to be classied
into the root category. This initial hierarchy with
the single concept croot is gradually expanded as
new instances become available and new concepts
are gathered starting from them.
Having a hierarchy containing at least the croot
concept, the algorithm sorts d new down by
recursively assigning the instance to the best child
category at each level. Classication of instances
into categories is in charge of the Classify function,
which receives an instance and a concept and
returns a value representing the evidence for the
fact that the instance should be classied under the
category the concept represents. In accomplishing
this goal, concept descriptions act as classiers,
which are trained by the algorithm to recognize
constitutive features of categories and thus dis-
criminate documents belonging to these categories.
A value returned from this function higher than a
given classication threshold t for the instance
d new and the concept c is interpreted as a decision
of classifying d new under c, while a value lower
than t is interpreted as a decision of not classifying
d new under c. After classifying d new into a category
c, the category classier is updated to include the
new instance. In the example of Fig. 1, a top level
classier decides the classication of documents
into the root category, the second level classiers
decide the classication into sports and politics
categories and so forth.
Denoting the concept where d new was last
classied as cparent ; the algorithm adds d new to the
best child concept of cparent (the one with higher
Classifyd new ; c) while there is a concept c such as
it is a child of cparent : Therefore, the classication
process stops when the instance reaches a terminal
concept or when it cannot be classied into any
child to justify sorting downward further. In any
case, cparent contains the last category the instance
was able to be classied into and below which it
needs to be clustered. An instance about basketball
in the previous example is expected to exceed the
classication threshold for concepts along the
complete path from the root to the basketball
category. However, an instance about tennis will
be probably classied into sports, but not into
basketball and football categories.
Once the instance reaches a given concept in the
hierarchy, terminal or non-terminal, it is added
either to the cluster below this concept where the
most similar instances are found or to a new
cluster if there are no similar enough instances, by
following a k-nearest neighbor approach (k-NN).
All instances below the concept cparent are in the
same category and, consequently, they are ex-
pected to share the terms describing this concept
and all its ancestors. For example, if cparent is the
concept representing the basketball category in
Fig. 1 and the algorithm has to decide which the
best cluster below this concept to place a new
instance is, the terms sports, team, score, basketball
and NBA are useless since they are equally likely to
appear in all clusters. For this reason, terms
included in the description of a concept and all
its ancestors are not considered at the moment of
clustering instances below it. In Algorithm 1, this
set of terms is denoted by T and is given to the k-
NN function to prevent them from being used on
instance comparisons taking place inside this
function.
Besides the set of terms T, the k-NN function
receives as input the new instance d new ; the concept
cparent where this instance was classied, and the
 ARTICLE IN PRESS
D. Godoy, A. Amandi / Information Systems 31 (2006) 247265
hierarchy H itself; and returns the cluster below
cparent where d new needs to be added, denoted by
si;parent : If d new is not similar enough to any other
instance in the existent clusters below cparent
according to an established similarity threshold
da new cluster is created in order to contain this
single instance and is returned by the k-NN
function. Hence, instances sufciently dissimilar
to all clusters in a given level of the hierarchy
create disjoint categories, whereas further inclu-
sions of instances in these clusters gives place to
new concepts in the downward extensions of the
hierarchy.
The insertion of an instance into a given cluster
causes a hierarchy revision and, possibly, the
denition of a new concept to summarize a given
category of instances. An Evaluation function
drives the entire process of conceptual hierarchy
formation. A low evaluation value for a cluster
indicates that either the cluster does not provide
enough information to dene a concept summar-
izing its instances, e.g., the cluster consists of only
a few instances, or there does not exist a set of
terms which precisely describe instances in the
cluster. Contrary to this, if the result of the
evaluation function exceeds a given evaluation
threshold j; a new concept is dened with an
associated description.
As mentioned, conceptual clustering relates
simultaneously to two problems: hierarchical
clustering (i.e., nding a hierarchy of useful subsets
of instances by dividing up training instances into
meaningful categories) and characterization (i.e.,
nding an intentional denition or description for
each of these categories). Therefore, while the
discovering of categories in the previous steps of
the algorithm aims at nding subsets of similar
instances, conceptual clustering extends this task
by trying to nd intensional descriptions of these
categories. In WebDCC the description of the new
concept cnew is generated by the ConceptFormation
function based on the set of instances contained in
the cluster si;parent : This function embodies a
feature selection method which extracts the set of
features which best characterizes the instances in a
given cluster. In this case, a lter approach
of feature selection is taken, in which a score
is individually computed for each feature
251
and features are ordered according to their
assigned scores. A feature selection threshold s is
dened such that the weight required for a feature
to be selected needs to be higher than this
threshold.
Finally, the concept cnew with its associa-
ted description is added as a child of concept
cparent in the hierarchy H and the instances
originally placed in the cluster which leads to
the new conceptas well as those in sibling
clustersare reorganized below the new
concept to form a new sub-hierarchy. In order to
create this new partition of instances, the
WebDCC algorithm is recursively run for each
instance being reorganized and the sub-hierarchy
having cnew as rootthose instances that can be
classied into the new category are removed from
their original position in the hierarchy to be placed
below cnew :
In the following subsections each of the main
parts of WebDCC are explained in detail. Section
2.1 describes the transformation of Web pages into
instances in WebDCC algorithm. The process of
hierarchical classication of instances into a given
hierarchy of concepts is presented in Section 2.2.
The k-NN approach for clustering instances at leaf
levels of the hierarchy is described in Section 2.3.
Section 2.4 explains the hierarchical concept
formation process.
2.1. Web page representation
Instances to be considered by the WebDCC
algorithm are represented using a bag-of-words
approach for document representation. According
to this approach documents are encoded as feature
vectors, being their elements the weights indicating
the importance of terms. In order to weight terms,
we rst compared the performance of boolean and
numerical weighting schemes in Web domain. For
this purpose, vectors representing Web pages were
constructed for the Syskill&Webert and the Bank-
Search collections (see description in Section 3). In
the boolean scheme, a term weight is 1 if the term
is present in the document and 0 if it is not, while
for achieving numerical weights we used the
document frequency normalized by a factor
representing the Euclidean vector length as
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252 D. Godoy, A. Amandi / Information Systems 31 (2006) 247265

follows: document collection is a priori unknown. As

documents are incorporated in the hierarchy, their
tf i terms are locally weighted so that not dictionary
q
Pi . (1)
tf 2 has to be built for this purpose.
n1 i

Algorithm 1 WebDCC Algorithm

Input: An instance d new to be added to a hierarchy H

Output: A hierarchy H 0 containing d new
1: WebDCCd new ; H
2: if H ; then
3: Initialize H with an empty concept croot
4: end if
/*Classification of the new instance into the current hierarchy of concepts*/
5: cparent croot
6: while 9c : childc; cparent true ^ Classifyd new ; cXt do
7: Let cparent be the concept c with higher Classifyd new ; c
8: Update c description to include d new
9: end while
/*Selection of the best possible cluster in cparent to contain the new instance*/
10: Let T be the set of terms ft : t 2 cparent _ t 2 ancestorcparent g
11: si;parent k-NN d new ; cparent ; H; T
12: Add d new to si;parent in H
/*A new concept definition is evaluated*/
13: if Evaluationsi;parent Xj thin
14: cnew ConceptFormationsi;parent
15: Add cnew to H as a child of cparent
/*Instances in clusters below cparent are considered to be reorganized below cnew */
16: for all d; j : d 2 sj;parent do
17: if Classifyd; cnew Xt then
18: Remove d from H
19: Let H new be the hierarchy with cnew as root
20: Replace H new by WebDCCd; H new in H
21: end if
22: end for
23: end if
24: Return H

Local weighting functions like this one reect
the importance of a term within a particular
document but not within the entire set of docu-
ments. Global functions like tf
idf (term fre-
quencyinverse document frequency) are not
applicable in this context since in an incremental
clustering approach such as WebDCC the entire
The performance of both weighting schemes was
evaluated using k-NN, which is applied at the
lowest levels of the hierarchy in WebDCC algo-
rithm. As clustering solutions resulting from the k-
NN algorithm are known to be affected by the
order in which instances are presented, all values
in this experiment were obtained as the average of
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D. Godoy, A. Amandi / Information Systems 31 (2006) 247265 253

ten algorithm runs with different sequence of
instances. The same orders of instances were then
repeated for every value of the similarity thresh-
old. Fig. 2 shows the variations in terms of
clustering quality along possible values of the
similarity threshold for boolean and numerical
weighing schemes measured by F-Measure [11].
According to these experimental results, hereafter
we consider instances to be Web page representa-
tions resulting from the application of the numer-
ical weighting scheme previously described as well
1.0
Numerical Weighting
0.9
Boolean Weighting
0.8
0.7
F-Measure
as the Porter stemming algorithm to reduce
morphological variants of terms in Web pages.
2.2. Hierarchical classification approach
In a rst stage of WebDCC algorithm, instances
have to be assigned to categories at the current
hierarchy of concepts. At any time, this hierarchy
could consist of only a single concept representing
the root category or several concepts in one or
more hierarchical levels. In other words, a text
categorization problem is stated where a set of
documents D fd 1 ; d 2 ; . . . ; d n g has to be assigned
to a set of prescribed categories C
fc1 ; c2 ; . . . ; cm g: Particularly, categories are dis-
posed in a hierarchy so that the task of categoriz-
ing text is known as hierarchical text
categorization as opposed to at text categoriza-
tion.

0.6
Exploiting the hierarchical relationships be-
0.5 tween categories, the global classication problem
0.4 can be divided into a set of smaller classication
problems corresponding to the splits in the
0.3
hierarchy. For each node in the hierarchical
0.2 structure, a separate classier is induced to
0.1 distinguish documents that should be assigned to
the category from other documents. In conse-
0.0
0.0 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7 0.8 0.9 1.0 quence, at each decision point in the hierarchy a
(a) Similarity Threshold classier is concerned with a binary classication
problem where a document is either relevant or
1.0 not to a given category.
0.9 Numerical Weighting Based on this hierarchical organization of
Boolean Weighting
classiers, the classication task takes place in a
0.8
top-down manner. Initially, instances belonging to
0.7 the root category (i.e., all documents) are categor-
ized by the rst level classiers. Having selected a
F-Measure

0.6
category at a certain level in the hierarchy, only its
0.5
children are considered as prospective categories at
0.4 the next level. This procedure continues until
0.3 either all instances have reached some leaf node
in the concept hierarchy or they cannot be further
0.2
classied.
0.1 The motivation behind the construction of a
0.0 hierarchy of classiers is twofold. First, existent
0.0 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7 0.8 0.9 1.0 experiences have shown that both precision and
(b) Similarity Threshold recall of at classiers decreases as the number of
Fig. 2. F-Measure scores for boolean and numerical weighting categories increases [12,13]. However, by dividing
schemes. the classication problem into several problems
 ARTICLE IN PRESS
254 D. Godoy, A. Amandi / Information Systems 31 (2006) 247265
involving a smaller number of categories, each
classier should be able to classify instances more
accurately. Second, as each classier deals with a
simpler classication task, it has only to focus on a
reduced set of features distinguishing instances
belonging to the category the classier represents.
As an example, it seems to be a fairly small set of
terms, such as sports, team and score, whose
presence in an instance clearly determines whether
an instance belong to the sports category instead of
the politics category for the hierarchy in Fig. 1. As
these terms are unlikely to be useful for the next
classiers to determine the category at the next
hierarchical level, each of these classiers should
be based on its own set of features, such as
football, cup and FIFA, on the one hand, and
basketball and NBA, on the other hand. A
reduction in the number of features not only
decreases the induction time, but it can also
increase the accuracy of the resulting model. Even
though each classier uses only a small set of
features, the overall set of features is used at
different stages of the classication process.
A classier is a function F i : d j ! 0; 1 that,
given an instance d j ; returns a number between 0
and 1 that represents the evidence for the fact that
d j should be classied under the category repre-
sented by ci : This function also has a threshold t
such that F i d j Xt is interpreted as a decision to
classify d j under ci ; while F i d j ot is interpreted
as a decision of not to classify d j under ci :
Although there are several types of classiers
potentially applicable to this problem (including
decision trees, Naive Bayes, etc.), linear classiers
exhibit interesting properties to be used in the
context of WebDCC algorithm. Linear classiers
are a family of text classication learning algo-
rithms which examine training instances a nite
number of times in order to construct a prototype
instance which is later compared with the instances
to be classied. A prototype, which serves also as
concept description, consists of a weighted vector:
ci ht1 ; w1 ; . . . ; tm ; wm i,
where wj is the weight associated to the term tj in
the category ci :
Linear classiers are both efcient, since classi-
cation is linear on the number of terms, instances
and categories, and easy to interpret, since it is
assumed that terms with higher weights are better
descriptors for a category than those with lower
weights. Furthermore, the representation of linear
classiers is similar to the representation of
documents, allowing them to take advantage of
standard information retrieval techniques.
WebDCC aims at obtaining a hierarchical set of
linear classiers, each of which is based on a set of
relevant features. This goal is achieved by combin-
ing a feature selection algorithm to choose
the appropriate terms at each node in the
tree and a supervised learning algorithm to
construct a classier for that node as it is explained
in Section 2.4.
In order to determine whether an instance d new
should be assigned to a given category ci in the
hierarchy of linear classiers, the dot product
between the document vector and the feature
weighted vector constituting the classier is
computed as follows:
X
m
Classifyd new ; ci d new  ci . (2)
i1
The value resulting from the application of this
function represents the condence in the fact that
an instance belongs to a given category. Hence, if
it is higher than a given classication threshold t;
the instance is assigned to the category; otherwise,
the document is considered as not belonging to the
category. For the classication of new instances,
the Classify function is applied to every concept at
each level of the hierarchy, obtaining a condence
value for the instance belonging to each of them.
For example, given the categories at the rst level
of the hierarchy C fcsports ; cpolitics g; the Classify
function applied to each of them might return the
following result: fcsports ; 0:97; cpolitics ; 0:14g: In
this case, it can be inferred that the document
d new is likely to belong to sports, but it can hardly
belong to politics category.
After the application of this function to
categories in a given hierarchy level three situa-
tions are possible: (1) The document exceeds the
threshold for only one category, in which case it is
classied in that category and the classication
continues at the next hierarchical level; (2) the
 ARTICLE IN PRESS
D. Godoy, A. Amandi / Information Systems 31 (2006) 247265
document exceeds the threshold in more than one
category, in which case the document is classied
into the best category and continues at the next
hierarchical level; (3) the document does not
exceed the threshold for any category, in which
case the classication stops and the instance is
clustered below this category.
Naturally, the value of threshold t plays an
important role in the classication process. A high
value of t would prevent instances from being
classied into the correct category, whereas a small
value of t would cause instances to be classied
into wrong categories. In order to tune this
parameter we carried out a number of experiments
with the Syskill&Webert and BankSearch collec-
tions. For these experiments, Web pages in both
collections were divided into a training set (60%)
and a test set (40%). The training set for the rst
collection resulted in 199 instances distributed in
the four categories present in the collection. Based
on this training set the algorithm generates the
hierarchy shown in Fig. 3. The training set for the
second collection was of 360 instances, on which
the algorithm was based to generate the hierarchy
shown in Fig. 4.
For each detected concept the gures summarize
the terms constituting the concept descriptions
along with term weights. As it can be observed, the
algorithm effectively identied the four concepts
involved in the rst set of pages as well as the two
hierarchical levels in the second one. Based on the
two hierarchies, we performed experiments with
the test set conformed by the remaining 133
instances in one case and 240 in the other, in
order to determine a suitable value for the
classication threshold t: In these experiments,
we measured the effectiveness of the classication
ROOT
excerb 1.0 goat 1.0 sheep 1.0 med
mon 1.0
medicin 0.8
mus 1.0
review 1.0
song 1.0
stere 1.0
Fig. 3. Hierarchy for the Syskill&Webert collection.
255
ROOT
team 0.076 code 0.128
race 0.198 england 0.191 java 0.324 visual 0.117
cup 0.149 basic 0.117
game 0.094
footbal 0.090
Fig. 4. Hierarchy for the BankSearch collection.
process using precision and recall measures i.e., the
ratio of correct decisions to the total number of
decision and the ratio of decisions to the total
number of documents, respectively. Those docu-
ments left in clusters below non-terminal cate-
gories were counted as not belonging to any
category, consequently, reducing recall but not
precision.
Fig. 5(a) and (b) plot the variation of precision
and recall along different values of the classica-
tion threshold t for both collections. In both
gures, there is a trend of precision to increase as
the classication threshold grows, so that the
probability of misclassication is reduced. How-
ever, the growing of the classication threshold
also causes a strong decrease in recall, leading to a
higher amount of pages to be placed outside the
category they belong to (in child clusters of root
category in the Syskill&Webert collection and in
child clusters of root category as well as Sports and
Programming Languages in the BankSearch collec-
tion). In the gures, the relationship between
precision and recall is also summarized by F-
Measure. According to the exposed results we
established the threshold value of t in 0:7; where a
compromise between recall and precision is
attained.
1.0
2.3. Non-hierarchical clustering approach
At the bottom levels of the hierarchy the
algorithm behaves as a simple k-NN algorithm.
The fundamental assumption behind this ap-
proach is that instances which are close together
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256 D. Godoy, A. Amandi / Information Systems 31 (2006) 247265

1.0 k 1 the instance is assigned to the cluster of

0.9 either the closest instance or to the cluster the
majority of the closest instances belong to if k41:
0.8 An instance not close enough to any other instance
0.7 in the current clusters given a predened similarity
threshold d; leads to a new singleton cluster.
0.6
k-NN is based on a distance measure among
0.5 instances which, in the case of documents make it
0.4 possible to determine the degree of resemblance
between vectors representing them. In this regard,
0.3 Precision the dominant similarity measure in information
Recall
0.2 FMeasure retrieval and text classication is the cosine
0.1
similarity measure that evaluates the cosine of
the angle conformed by two vectors in the space
0.0 [14]. This cosine similarity can be calculated as the
0.0 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7 0.8 0.9 1.0
normalized dot product:
(a) Classification Threshold
Pr
k1 wik  wjk
1.0 simd i ; d j q
Pr q
Pr , (3)
2 2
0.9 k1 wik  k1 wjk

0.8 where d i and d j are the respective instances, wik

0.7 and wjk the weights of the word k in each instance
and r the number of different words in both
0.6
instances. In order to handle other structures
0.5 besides text, such as RDF-based meta-data de-
0.4 scriptions, more specic similarity measures need
Precision to be dened to compare other instances attributes
0.3 Recall
FMeasure and their values.
0.2 As k-NN determines the best clusters for a new
0.1
instance using the k nearest instances, both the
similarity measure and, particularly, the similarity
0.0 threshold have a critical effect on the k-NN
0.0 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7 0.8 0.9 1.0
performance. We carried out a number of experi-
(b) Classification Threshold
ments with the mentioned collections in order to
Fig. 5. Classication threshold setting. determine the range of values for the similarity
threshold d in which the WebDCC algorithm
reaches better quality solutions. For these experi-
ments, we analyzed two aspects of the resulting
in the feature space according to an appropriate clustering solutions the similarity threshold d
similarity measure belong to a same class. Thus, impacts on, the total number of clusters and the
once an instance has reached a given concept in the cluster homogeneity. A value of d near to 0 will
hierarchy, either because this concept is a terminal produce very few clusters (a single cluster when
one or because the instance cannot be further d 0) grouping even highly dissimilar instances,
classied down, it is placed in the cluster the which is almost as informative as the original
majority of the k nearest instances belong to. In collection of documents; while a value of d near to
order to determine which of these instances are, a 1 will produce a big number of clusters (the same
new instance d new must be compared with every number of cluster as instances when d 1), which
instance already seen by the algorithm. Finally, if is highly informative but practically useless.
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D. Godoy, A. Amandi / Information Systems 31 (2006) 247265 257

In order to take into consideration these two 1.5

aspects in the similarity threshold tuning, we 1.4
analyzed the quality of clustering solutions of k- 1.3
NN algorithm under variations of d based on the 1.2
1.1
number of resultant clusters and a measure of
1.0
cluster homogeneity such as Entropy [15]. Labeled
0.9
training data were used for entropy calculation but 0.8
not during clustering, expecting clusters generated 0.7
by the algorithm to be as homogeneous as possible 0.6
with respect to the labeling of their containing 0.5
instances. However, since the best entropy is 0.4 Validity Measure
Entropy
achieved when each cluster contains exactly one 0.3 Number of Clusters
single instance, a suitable value of d is always a 0.2
trade-off between entropy and number of clusters. 0.1
Fig. 6(a) and (b) plot achieved values with these 0.0
0.0 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7 0.8 0.9 1.0
measures along values of the similarity threshold (a) Similarity Threshold
for the datasets being analyzed. Again, results
summarize ten algorithm runs with different 2.0
sequences of instances. Entropy and number of 1.9
1.8
clusters are summarized in both gures into a 1.7
single value by means of the information-theoretic 1.6
1.5
external cluster-validity measure proposed by [16], 1.4
simply validity measure hereafter. This measure 1.3 Entropy
1.2 Number of Clusters
renes entropy to penalize both highly hetero- 1.1 Validity Measure
geneous clusters as well as large number of 1.0
clusters. As it can be observed in both gures, 0.9
0.8
the lines for normalized entropy and number of 0.7
clusters (a proportion over the maximum possible 0.6
0.5
number of clusters) cross each other near to the 0.4
similarity threshold value of d 0:2; where coin- 0.3
0.2
cidently the minimum value of the validity 0.1
measure is achieved. 0.0
0.0 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7 0.8 0.9 1.0
(b) Similarity Threshold
2.4. Hierarchical concept formation approach
Fig. 6. Similarity threshold setting.
Hierarchical concept formation involves the
gradual creation of concepts summarizing in- the formation of concepts until evidence about
stances within clusters and is mainly driven by several categories is gathered. In the algorithm
the Evaluation function. Every time a cluster intended destination, which is modeling user
updating takes place, caused by the insertion of a interests, this is particularly advantageous as
new instance into the hierarchy, this function interests do not develop similarly (e.g., if the user
determines whether a new concept can be dened reads more about sports than about politics, the
to summarize a given set of instances. Because of rst concept should be created before and inde-
the incremental nature of the algorithm, concept pendently of the second one).
formation is dened over the instances that are Given the algorithm goal, which is partitioning
part of a cluster without taking into consideration the whole set of instances into a collection of
those assigned to other clusters in the hierarchy. crescent specicity categories, a suitable evaluation
Thus, the algorithm does not unnecessarily retard measure should recognize the opportunity to
 ARTICLE IN PRESS
258 D. Godoy, A. Amandi / Information Systems 31 (2006) 247265
create a new concept each time the existence of
instances from more than one category is
presumed inside a cluster. In other words, the
lack of cluster cohesiveness can be considered
as a good indicator for the fact that, even though
instances belong to a same cluster because of
their common features, they correspond to dis-
tinctive aspects of a same general category.
Furthermore, it can be assumed that subtracting
the set of features shared by most instances in the
cluster to describe a general category, a new
partitioning of instances could be obtained and
the hierarchy could gain an additional level of
specicity.
A method to compute cluster cohesiveness
consist in using the average pairwise similarity of
instances in the cluster as follows:
1 X
Evaluationsr simd i ; d j ,
n2r d ;d 2s
i j r
where nr is the size of the cluster sr : Mathemati-
cally, the average pairwise similarity between all
instances in the cluster, including self-similarity, is
equivalent to the length of the centroid vector
since all documents are scaled to be unit
length. Therefore, the cohesiveness value can be
efciently calculated by using the centroid vector
of clusters.
If the cohesiveness value is higher than a
threshold j; a new concept is created. Otherwise,
no updating in the hierarchy takes place. We have
empirically determined a value of j 0:25 by
comparing hierarchies of concepts generated with
different values of j for Syskill&Webert and
BankSearch collections against the target hierar-
chies i.e., the hierarchy containing the four topics
for the former collection and the hierarchy
containing two topics in the rst level and four
topics in the second one in the later collection.
In case the creation of a new concept is
established, a feature selection method is applied
over the instances in the cluster to be summarized.
This method takes as input a set of features and
outputs a subset of these features which are
relevant to the target concept. Two main feature
selection approaches are used in machine learning
[17]: ltering and wrapper approach. Feature
selection in the WebDCC algorithm is performed
by a lter approach based on an ordering scheme.
In this approach, a weight is individually com-
puted for each feature and features are ordered
according to their assigned weights. A feature
selection threshold, s; is dened in the 0; 1 range
such that the weight required for a feature to be
selected needs to be higher than s: A simple and
effective approach to weigh terms is the document
frequency, denoted by DF tk ; which is the number
of instances in which the term tk occurs. The
document frequency is computed for every unique
term appearing in the cluster and those terms
whose document frequency is less than s are
removed from the feature space. This method
assumes that rare terms are either non-informative
for category prediction or not inuential in global
performance.
After feature selection a supervised learning
(4)
algorithm is applied to learn a classier for the new
category. In particular, we used in this work an
instantiation of the Rocchio algorithm [18], the
same used in [19], with parameter xed to a 1
and b 0 where a prototype for a category ci 2 C
is dened as follows:
1 X
pci d. (5)
nci d2D
ci
Hence, a classier for a category ci is the plain
average or centroid of all instances belonging to
this category. For the classication of new
instances, the closeness of an instance to the
prototype vector is computed by using the dot
product as is described in Eq. (2).
As was stated by [20], an accurate classication
can be based on only a few features, those with
better discriminant power to a given category.
According to this observation, we propose an
aggressive selection of terms by setting the selec-
tion threshold s to a very high value. We analyzed
the effects of varying this parameter in terms of the
quality of the achieved clustering solutions. Fig. 7
plots F-Measure scores reached for different
values of the selection threshold s for the
Syskill&Webert and BankSearch collections. In
both cases the highest values are reached for a
value of s equal to 0.8.
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D. Godoy, A. Amandi / Information Systems 31 (2006) 247265
1.0
0.9
0.8
0.7
0.6
F-Measure
0.5
0.4
0.3
0.2 Syskill&Webert collection
BankSearch collection
0.1
0.0
0.0 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7 0.8 0.9 1.0
Feature Selection Threshold
Fig. 7. Selection threshold setting.
3. Dataset description
In this paper, we carried out a number of
experiments with the Syskill&Webert Web Page
Ratings collection [21] as well as the BankSearch
Web Page collection [22].
Web pages in the Syskill&Webert collection
belong to four different categories: Bands (61
pages), Goats (70 pages), Sheep (65 pages) and
BioMedical (136 pages). From the original dataset
we removed empty pages and those corresponding
to not found pages leading to a total of 332 Web
pages. This dataset also contains a single user
rating of the interest in each page in a three point
scale, hot or very interesting (108 pages), medium
or quite interesting (9 pages) and cold or not
interesting (215 pages). User ratings provide a
valuable means to evaluate the performance of
personal information agents in Web page user
interest prediction.
A second dataset, the BankSearch Web page
collection, was used to study the hierarchical
clustering solutions provided by WebDCC algo-
rithm. From this collection we used a subset of 600
Web pages divided into two broad categories
Sports (300 pages) and Programming Languages
(300 pages). Within these categories pages belong
to two subcategories: Motor Sports (150 pages)
259
and Soccer (150 pages) within Sports; and Visual
Basic (150 pages) and Java (150 pages) within
Programming Languages.
4. Evaluation of clustering results
In order to evaluate WebDCC performance we
compared its results with those obtained from the
traditional hierarchical agglomerative clustering
(HAC) [23]. HAC involves building a tree struc-
ture by using a bottom-up method. An agglom-
erative algorithm begins with each instance in a
distinct cluster and successively merges the two
most similar clusters at each step to create a new
internal node in the tree. This process continues
until a single, all-inclusive root node is reached.
The result of a hierarchical clustering algorithm is
a binary tree, or dendrogram, that depicts the
merging process and the intermediate clusters.
Agglomerative clustering depends on the deni-
tion of a similarity measure between clusters to
determine the pairs of clusters to be merged at
each step. Numerous approaches have been
developed for computing this similarity being the
most common alternatives the single-link, com-
plete-link and group-average schemes. The single-
link scheme measures the similarity of two clusters
by the maximum similarity between the documents
from each cluster, the complete-link by the
minimum similarity and the group-average scheme
measured the similarity of two clusters as the
average of the pairwise similarity of documents
from both clusters.
In order to experimentally contrast the perfor-
mance obtaining hierarchical clustering solutions
of agglomerative clustering and WebDCC algo-
rithms, we compared the entropy values achieved
with the previous datasets. As the resulting
dendrogram of an agglomerative clustering can
be analyzed at different levels of granularity, we
summarized the results obtained by stopping the
agglomeration process when k clusters were left.
The results of HAC with different number of
clusters using the single-link, complete-link, and
group-average schemes are shown in Tables 1 and
2 for the Syskill&Webert and BankSearch collec-
tions, respectively. By running the WebDCC
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260 D. Godoy, A. Amandi / Information Systems 31 (2006) 247265

Table 1 two categories in the rst hierarchical level (but

Evaluation of WebDCC and HAC in the Syskill&Webert
outside terminal categories).
collection
In spite of the non-incremental nature of HAC,
Algorithm # Clusters Single-link Complete- Group- its results are only comparable with those of
link average WebDCC when a high number of clusters is
considered. In both tables, the best result of
HAC 2 0.953 0.788 0.953
4 0.949 0.607 0.948 agglomerative clustering for every cluster similar-
5 0.946 0.603 0.944 ity scheme is underlined. Agglomerative clustering
7 0.939 0.484 0.556 reached lower entropy values than WebDCC only
10 0.933 0.439 0.342 with 20 clusters and complete-link or group-
15 0.918 0.373 0.277
average schemes. It is worth noticing that
20 0.902 0.174 0.143
Average 0.934 0.495 0.594 WebDCC not only obtained better solutions with
fewer clusters, but also generated descriptive
hierarchies for each collection in an incremental
WebDCC 5 0.198 0.198 0.198
fashion. Conversely, dendograms from agglom-
erative clustering are difcult to explore since no
descriptive information about clusters is provided
Table 2 and different partitions of instances can be
Evaluation of WebDCC and HAC in the BankSearch collection achieved depending on the level of the tree.
Algorithm # Clusters Single-link Complete- Group-
link average

HAC 2 0.994 0.883 0.994

5. An experience with WebDCC: the
4 0.986 0.698 0.986
5 0.983 0.649 0.587 PersonalSearcher agent
7 0.969 0.560 0.575
10 0.961 0.467 0.389 WebDCC algorithm was applied in the devel-
15 0.943 0.336 0.370 opment of an agent that assists users in nding
20 0.920 0.263 0.328
interesting documents on the Web, named Perso-
Average 0.965 0.550 0.604
nalSearcher [24]. This agent carries out a parallel
search in the most popular Web search engines
WebDCC 7 0.384 0.384 0.384
and lters the resultant list of Web documents
according to user proles it builds based on
the observation of user browsing behavior on
algorithm over these datasets, we obtained two the Web.
hierarchies with a high number of clusters in their For each reading in the standard browser the
leaves and, consequently, low entropy values. In agent observes a set of indicators in order to
order to compare WebDCC results with those estimate the user interest in a given Web page. This
obtained from HAC, we calculated entropy con- mechanism, known as implicit feedback, allows
sidering ve clusters for the Syskill&Webert the agent to obtain Web pages relevant to the user
collection and seven for the BankSearch collection. without distracting him from his normal behavior.
In the rst case, four clusters correspond to the These indicators are the time consumed in reading
four terminal categories (instances in each of these with relation to its length, the amount of scrolling
categories are considered a single cluster) and the in a page and whether it was added to the list of
last cluster groups those instances left in the root bookmarks. Web pages considered interesting by
category. In the second case, four clusters corre- the user through this means are used as input to
spond to the terminal categories and the remaining the WebDCC algorithm, whereas algorithm out-
three clusters correspond to instances left in the put corresponds to the hierarchy of concepts
root category and instances left as children of the constituting the user prole.
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D. Godoy, A. Amandi / Information Systems 31 (2006) 247265 261

Users interact with their PersonalSearcher ex-

pressing their information needs by keywords as
usual. The agent posts these queries to the most
popular search engines (Google, Yahoo, etc.),
obtaining a set of documents that cover a wide
portion of the Web. The relevance degree of each
document in relation to the user prole is
computed by the agent to determine the conve-
nience of suggesting the document to the user for
future reading. Only documents that exceed a user
given relevance threshold as regard to some
category in the user prole are sent back to the
user as a result to his query. PersonalSearcher
allows the user to customize the desired level of
assistance at any moment by adjusting the thresh- Fig. 9. Example of search results in PersonalSearcher.
old from the agent graphical user interface (GUI).
In order to illustrate PersonalSearcher behavior,
let us suppose a user who possesses a number of
reading experiences in the Visual Basic and Java
programming languages along with some readings
about soccer and motor sports. Fig. 8 shows a
prole for such user, which has been built using
Web pages from the BankSearch collection. If this
user performs a Web search using the keywords
programming languages the list of resulting pages
may include pages about several aspects of
programming, ranging from theoretical studies to
diverse languages as the search results shown in
Fig. 9. However, knowing the user interests,
PersonalSearcher suggests pages mostly related
to Visual Basic and Java as can be observed in
Fig. 10. Example of suggestions in PersonalSearcher.

Fig. 10. Those pages belonging to other languages

Fig. 8. Example of an user prole in PersonalSearcher.
as FoxPro or C++ were discarded by the agent as
they were considered uninteresting to the user.
The effectiveness of PersonalSearcher to recom-
mend Web pages during searching was evaluated
based on the standard precision and recall
measures from information retrieval [14]. From
the user point of view, precision measures the
proportion of relevant documents in those recom-
mended by the agent while recall is the proportion
of relevant documents in the search results that
were in fact recommended to the user. In order to
calculate precision and recall values it is necessary
to know the relevance of each document in the
 ARTICLE IN PRESS
262 D. Godoy, A. Amandi / Information Systems 31 (2006) 247265
search results. We used for this experiment the
ratings given by a single user to pages in the
Syskill&Webert collection that, as we have men-
tioned, are in a three point scale: hot (very
interesting), medium (quite interesting) and cold
(not interesting at all).
A total of 82 pages (70%) from the 117 marked
as hot and medium were used to build three
different proles, the rst one with 50% of these
pages (41 pages), the second with 70% (57 pages)
and the third with 100% (82 pages). Based on each
of these proles we compared the agent effective-
ness in recommending Web pages, considering as a
result of a Web search the remaining pages, i.e.,
search result consist of all the cold pages in the
collection and the remaining 35 hot and medium
pages not previously used in prole construction.
Fig. 11 shows the average of precision and recall
reached by the agent along different values of the
relevance threshold. This gure also shows varia-
tions in precision/recall value for the three
different user prole sizes (amount of experi-
ences/pages). From these results, we conclude that
the agent improves its performance as the user
prole grows and the agent has more knowledge
about the user interests. The highest accuracy was
always obtained with the relevance threshold set in
0.6 regardless of the user prole size. According to
these results, PersonalSearcher is congured to use
1.0
0.9
0.8
0.7
0.6
Accuracy
0.5
0.4
0.3 50%
70%
0.2 100%
0.1
0.0
0.0 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7 0.8 0.9 1.0
Relevance Threshold
Fig. 11. Accuracy of Web page prediction in PersonalSearcher.
this value by default, although the user can
still manually change this relevance threshold from
the GUI.
PersonalSearcher agents assisting several users
can take advantage of existing knowledge in the
community they are immerse in through coopera-
tion. A quantitative comparison of user proles,
based on the Triple Matching-Model (MD3) [25],
was implemented in PersonalSearcher in order to
enable cooperation. Initial experimental results in
prole comparison proved that similar topics in
two user proles can be identied by applying the
previous model [26]. A cooperative approach
foster knowledge sharing and, consequently,
would potentially enrich the results of individual
agents by accessing other agent experience.
6. Related works
Hierarchical conceptual clustering plays an
important role in ontology learning for the
Semantic Web. Manual creation of ontologies by
domain experts presents the well-known problem
of acquisition bottleneck, however fully automat-
ing creation of ontologies is unfeasible. Ontology
learning aims at integrating numerous disciplines,
particularly machine learning, to facilitate ontol-
ogy construction. As an example, the Text-to-
Onto [5] is a framework which combines knowl-
edge acquisition with machine learning to extract
semantics from resources found on the Web (e.g.,
free text, semistructured text and schema deni-
tions). In this framework, ontology extraction
gleans a major part of the target ontology from
Web documents through learning. Particularly,
hierarchical conceptual clustering is recognized as
a powerful method in the ontology extraction
phase, whose results are rened and validated in
later ontology learning steps [4]. In the same line of
research, a conceptual clustering algorithm such as
COBWEB [27] was applied to ontology discovery
in on-line communities [6]. COBWEB results are
translated to RDF schemes for the Semantic Web
and used by a song recommendation application.
In contrast to the referred works, whose goal is to
extract semantic knowledge from unnotated Web
pages, approaches for clustering objects described
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D. Godoy, A. Amandi / Information Systems 31 (2006) 247265
by ontology-based meta-data are proposed in
[28,29]. A study of the impact the Semantic Web
would have on learning algorithms used for user
proling and personalization was performed in
[30]. Results from this study demonstrated that
available Semantic Web markup cannot be ex-
pected to outperform conventional machine learn-
ing applied to plain text in regard to the accuracy
of the learned model. Nevertheless, meaningful
and potentially reusable knowledge was discovered
by applying Inductive Logic programming techni-
ques [31] over Web pages annotated with semantic
meta-data.
From the user proling perspective, the short-
comings of existent clustering algorithms to build
user proles are mostly related to the clustering
solutions they are able to supply, which do no
resemble user interests, or to the way they build
such solutions, which is generally no incremental.
In this regard, hierarchical clustering techniques
build tree structures by using either a bottom-up,
agglomerative method or a top-down, divisive
method. The former begins with each instance in a
distinct cluster and successively merges the most
similar clusters at each step to create a new
internal node in the tree. This process continues
until a single, all-inclusive root node is reached.
The latter, instead, starts with a single cluster
containing all instances and splits resulting clusters
until only clusters of individual instances remain.
Merging of clusters or individual instances in
agglomerative clustering as well as splitting in
divisive clustering are usually binary, resulting in a
binary tree or dendogram that contains clustering
information on many different levels. However,
the exploration of clustering solutions requires too
much insight of the user as these clustering
algorithms do not make any attempt to character-
ize clusters. Conversely, algorithms in the con-
ceptual clustering paradigm involved create
concepts that dene or exemplify the properties
of a set of instances. COBWEB, for example, is an
incremental conceptual clustering algorithm which
constructs a tree from a sequence of observations.
Each discovered concept in COBWEB records the
probability of each attribute and value and is
updated every time an instance is added. A
category utility measure is used to determine
263
whether child concepts should be created. How-
ever, probabilistic concepts of COBWEB limit the
application of this algorithm in document cluster-
ing where the space of features and values is highly
dimensional.
7. Conclusions
In user proling, document clustering offers the
advantage that an a priori knowledge of user
interest categories is not needed, so that the
categorization is completely unsupervised.
WebDCC is a conceptual clustering algorithm
designed to support user proling in intelligent
information agents. The advantages of this algo-
rithm are twofold. First, as an incremental
approach it allows agents to interact with users
over time to acquire and adapt user interest
categories. As a result, agents are able to deal
with unpredictable and changing subject areas,
that cannot be anticipated by agent developers.
Moreover, this algorithm enables an agent not
only to discover a set of categories of interests, but
also to focus on the aspects of these categories the
user is really interested in. Consequently, a user
prole contains categories at different levels of
specicity according to user experiences on each of
them. Second, unlike most user proling ap-
proaches, WebDCC offers comprehensible cluster-
ing solutions that can be easily interpreted and
explored by either users or other agents. WebDCC
capability for extracting semantics from Web
documents enables it to be integrated in the
ontology extraction phase that brings support
to the ontology learning process for the Seman-
tic Web.
In this paper, we also compared clustering
solutions provided by WebDCC from those of
agglomerative hierarchical clustering (HAC). Ex-
perimental results demonstrated that in spite of the
incremental nature of WebDCC, its performance
is similar or even better, considering a reduced
number of clusters, than the performance of HAC.
Moreover, our algorithm offers the added value of
a conceptual hierarchy to be used by personal
agents. In spite of the potentials of this algorithm
to the proposed task, there are some issues that
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264 D. Godoy, A. Amandi / Information Systems 31 (2006) 247265
require a thorough analysis. First, as an incre-
mental approach, WebDCC is affected by the
order in which instances are presented. It remains
to evaluate whether a strategy to reduce the impact
of instances ordering would improve clustering
quality solutions. Second, despite preliminary
experiments have suggested promising results,
prole comparison in agent communities perform-
ing collaborative ltering needs further analysis.
An application of WebDCC in a real-word
agent as PersonalSearcher have proved the algo-
rithm capacity for handling the task at hand. In
this experience, the algorithm generates accurate
proles which allow agents to provide affective
personalization, to adapt proles in order to
improve agents efciency over time and to present
comprehensible proles to users. Concept hierar-
chies produced by WebDCC also facilitate prole
comparison in order to assist a community of users
in a collaborative way by identifying concepts
users have in common.
Acknowledgements
Research reported in this paper has been
partially supported by Fundacion Antorchas.
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