Towards Cognitive Modeling of User Needs in Web Browsing Activities

There is an increasing reliance on the Internet for information seeking in many everyday activities. While spending on Internet connectivity has increased, besides traditional IR-based search engines, there is still a lack of tools for helping users searching information in this large, self-organizing and dynamic environment. Very few attempts have been undertaken to better understand the user behaviour, preferences and needs during Web information seeking tasks. Cognitive models, as approximations of cognitive processes able to predict and comprehend basic human tasks, have the chance to provide a deep analysis of the user behaviour during Web search activities. In this paper, we summarize the models recently proposed to address this issue, and we present a novel approach based on the SAM theory bent on the recognition of the user needs during Web browsing activities. The simulation of the human memory processes in terms of learning and recall by means of short and long-term semantic memory structures provides relevant information useful to adapt the traditional HCI in several important domains, such as filtering, retrieval and recommending systems.