On the use of Soft Computing techniques for Web Personalization

Due to the growing variety and quantity of information available on the Web, there is urgent need for developing Web-based applications capable of adapting their services to the needs of the users. This is the main rationale behind the flourishing area of Web personalization that finds in soft computing (SC) techniques a valid tool to handle uncertainty in Web usage data and develop Web-based applications tailored to user preferences. The main reason for this success seems to be the synergy resulting from SC paradigms, such as fuzzy logic, neural networks, and genetic algorithms. Each of these computing paradigms provides complementary reasoning and searching methods that allow the use of domain knowledge and empirical data to solve complex problems. In this chapter, we emphasize the suitability of hybrid schemes combining different SC techniques for the development of effective Web personalization systems. In particular, we present a neuro-fuzzy approach for Web personalization that combines techniques from the fuzzy and the neural paradigms to derive knowledge from Web usage data and represent the knowledge in the comprehensible form of fuzzy rules. The derived knowledge is ultimately used to dynamically suggest interesting links to the user of a Web site.