Personalized Social Query Expansion Using Folksonomy

In this paper we address the problem of query expansion and personalization which intends to enrich user queries with additional information to maximize her satisfaction according to, e.g., her interests and her social ecosystem. A key problem is how to identify the terms to be added, and how to integrate them into the query. While focusing on social tagging systems, the proposed approach considers (i) the semantic similarity between tags composing a query, (ii) a social proximity between the query and the user profile for personalized expansion, and (iii) on the fly, a strategy for expanding user queries. The proposed approach has been evaluated using a large dataset crawled from del.icio.us and compared to the closest related work. The promising results obtained show the clear benefit of our approach.