Web Site Adaptation: Recommendation and Automatic Generation of Navigation Menus

Abstract

In recommender systems the interests of users are typically represented as unordered sets of pages. However, on web sites where the pages are not independent of each other, the order in which the pages are visited is important. A recommender should not only recommend the right pages, but also recommend them in the right order. A widely used form of recommending is the context dependent navigation menu. In this short paper we compare content and usage based methods to build navigation menus from scratch. In our experiments the navigation traces of users clearly showed stages, which indicates that users prefer to view pages in a specific order. Content based methods appear to be adequate for creating menus that group of pages with similar topics, but do not provide an ordering. Usage based methods are necessary to recommend pages that match a user’s current navigation stage.