Ontological User Profiles for Representing Context in Web Search

The goal of Web search personalization is to tailor search results to a particular user based on that user's interests and preferences. We present an approach to personalized search that involves building models of user context as ontological profiles by assigning implicitly derived interest scores to existing concepts in a domain ontology. Our experiments show that re-ranking the search results based on the interest scores and the semantic evidence in an ontological user profile is effective in presenting the most relevant results to the user.