Topical Generalization of Expertise Profiles: Toward a Usable Up-To-Date Profile Page.

Fine-grained user profile generation approaches have made it increasingly feasible to display on a profile page in which topics a user has expertise or interest. Earlier work on topical user profiling has been directed at enhancing search and personalization functionality, but making such profiles useful for human consumption presents new challenges. With this work, we have taken a first step toward a semantic layout method for topical user profiles. We have developed a topical generalization approach which forms clusters of topics, based on their association with broader topics in the Wikipedia category graph. This approach was evaluated with a task-based user study that reveals several of its current limitations, and indicates directions for its improvement.