Personalized ranking for digital libraries based on log analysis.

Given the exponential increase of indexable context on the Web, ranking is an increasingly difficult problem in information retrieval systems. Recent research shows that implicit feedback regarding user preferences can be extracted from web access logs in order to increase ranking performance. We analyze the implicit user feedback from access logs in the CiteSeer academic search engine and show how site structure can better inform the analysis of clickthrough feedback providing accurate personalized ranking services tailored to individual information retrieval systems. Experiment and analysis shows that our proposed method is more accurate on predicting user preferences than any non-personalized ranking methods when user preferences are stable over time. We compare our method with several non-personalized ranking methods including ranking SVMlight as well as several ranking functions specific to the academic document domain. The results show that our ranking algorithm can reach 63.59% accuracy in comparison to 50.02% for ranking SVMlight and below 43% for all other single feature ranking methods. We also show how the derived personalized ranking vectors can be employed for other ranking-related purposes such as recommendation systems.