Patent ID: 8140706

Claim:
A method for identifying user types in a collection of connected content portions, comprising: determining a topology data structure by identifying connections or links between content portions; determining at least one significant user path among a plurality of user paths between connected content portions in the determined topology data structure, the connected content portions being content portions connected to or linked to other content portions and reachable via a threshold number of traversals by a user from an initial content portion in the topology data structure, the at least one significant user path defined by accesses to the connected content portions by the user; determining a multi-modal user path user information need for each at least one significant user path in the topology data structure; 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 and at least one of connection feature information, inward connection feature information and outward connection feature information, which wherein for a selected content portion, the connection feature information indicates a connection that appears on the selected content portion, the inward connection feature information indicates a connection that refers to the selected content portion in the collection of connected content portions, and the outward connection feature information indicates a connection that is referred to by the selected content portion in the collection of connected content portions; combining each multi-modal content portion feature information for the user path with the multi-modal user path user information need into a 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; clustering the multi-modal user path information based on the multi-modal clustering type, the similarity function and the measure of similarity; and determining user types based on the clustered multi-modal user path information; wherein determining the inward connection feature information and the outward connection feature information further comprises normalizing the inward connection feature information and the outward connection feature information; and wherein each content portion in the user path is weighted using at least one of a content portion access frequency weighting, a weighting of the content portion based on content portion position in the user path.