Patent ID: 7260643

Claim:
A method for identifying user types in a collection of connected content portions, comprising: determining at least one significant user path of connected content portions; determining a multi-modal user path user information need for each at least one significant user path and the user information need includes a value that reflects a probability that a user will browse through a content portion in at least one significant user path; the probability being estimated using a spreading activation algorithm which generates a document vector A using the following formulas: A (1)=ALPHA*Matrix S*E (1) A ( t )=ALPHA*Matrix S*A ( t− 1)+ E (2) where the formulas are applied t times, the matrix S reflects a topology matrix, vector E reflects the user path, and ALPHA reflects the probability a user will browse through the content portion; for each content portion comprising each of the at least one significant user path, determining a multi-modal content portion feature information including a content feature information, connection feature information, inward connection feature information and outward connection feature information; combining each multi-modal content portion feature information for the user path with the multi-modal user path user information need into multi-modal user path information; determining a similarity function and a measure of similarity for the multi-modal user path information; determining a multi-modal clustering type; and clustering the multi-modal user path information based on the multi-modal clustering type, the similarity function and the measure of similarity.