Beyond the Usual Suspects: Context-Aware Revisitation Support

Ricardo Kawase @HT2011

A considerable amount of our activities on the Web involves revisits to pages or sites. Reasons for revisiting include active monitoring of content, verification of information, regular use of online services, and reoccurring tasks. Browsers support for revisitation is mainly focused on frequently and recently visited pages. In this paper we present a dynamic browser toolbar that provides recommendations beyond these usual suspects, balancing diversity and relevance. The recommendation method used is a combination of ranking and propagation methods. Experimental outcomes show that this algorithm performs significantly better than the baseline method. Further experiments address the question whether it is more appropriate to recommend specific pages or rather (portal pages of) Web sites. We conducted two user studies with a dynamic toolbar that relies on our recommendation algorithm. In this context, the outcomes confirm that users appreciate and use the contextual recommendations provided by the toolbar.

Venue: HT2011

Authors: Ricardo Kawase, George Papadakis, Eelco Herder and Wolfgang Nejdl

Award:  Engelbart Best Paper Award (HT2011)

PDF: kawase-ht2011

Supporting revisitation with contextual suggestions

Web browsers provide only little support for users to revisit pages that they do not visit very often. We developed a browser toolbar that reminds users of visited pages related to the page that they currently viewing. The recommendation method combines ranking with propagation methods. A user evaluation shows that on average 22.7% of the revisits were triggered by the toolbar, a considerable change on the participants’ revisitation routines. In this paper we discuss the value of the recommendations and the implications derived from the evaluation.

Venue: JCDL2011

Authors: Ricardo Kawase, George Papadakis and Eelco Herder

PDF: kawase-jcdl2011b