Concept hierarchies and human navigation

We are confronted with massive amounts of information at every turn. In order to efficiently reason about knowledge and information, humans have evolved efficient strategies for organizing complex concepts in order to form connections between and recall information. This behavior can be observed and codified when people search for objects within digital information networks. Current models of search behavior exhibit unnecessary or extraneous complexity. Minimal or simple modifications to well established algorithms yield valid models of human navigation by exploring hierarchical information inherent in networks. We explore and validate a new model of how humans navigate an information networks. To that end, we present a new path finding algorithm that approximates human navigation by leveraging the categorical classification of the nodes within the network. We compare our new model, CatPath, to existing graph distance measures when possible and show that the category paths are largely correlated with traces of human navigation.