Emergent semantics from users' browsing paths

Abstract

The authors of web pages are not aware of the ways their content is used. The innocent information published on the web could be used for malicious purposes. We argue that authors of web pages cannot completely define the page's semantics and that semantics emerge through use. Our goal is to derive the emergent semantics of the browsing paths of the users. Our research can be considered as the reciprocal of search engines: the problem is to derive the semantics from the sequence of web pages traversed by a user. Using an iterative process, we derive the semantic breakpoints of long browsing paths. This identifies short sub-paths with coherent uniform semantics. Using a variation of Latent Semantic Analysis, we attempt to derive high-level semantics of the browsing pattern of the user. With additional training data, an application of this research leads to terrorist trend detection. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003.