SYSTEMS AND METHODS FOR PLACING ADVERTISEMENTS
Systems and methods provide techniques for associating advertisements with relevant content on a user interface. A method for placing advertisements on a user interface includes providing a user interface having a plurality of user interface screens, at least some of the plurality of user interface screens containing user-selectable control objects, and determining which of a plurality of advertisements to display on a user interface screen based on at least one of the following criteria: topical relevance, contextual relevance, path relevance and cognitive prominence
1 . (canceled)
2 . A method for placing advertisements on a user interface comprising the steps of:
providing a user interface having a plurality of graphical user interface screens, at least some of said plurality of user interface screens containing user-selectable control objects; and
determining which of a plurality of advertisements to display on a user interface screen based on at least one of the following criteria: topical relevance, contextual relevance, path relevance and cognitive prominence.
3 . The method of claim 2 , wherein said at least one criteria includes topical relevance and wherein said topical relevance is a measure of a relationship between one or more topics associated with each advertisement and one or more topics associated with said user-selectable control objects on said respective user interface screen.
4 . The method of claim 3 , wherein said topical relevance is calculated as:
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where δ is the distance of a topic point from the root node.
5 . The method of claim 2 , wherein said at least one criteria includes contextual relevance and wherein said contextual relevance is a measure of a relationship between a theme of the respective user interface screen and a theme associated with each advertisement.
6 . The method of claim 5 , wherein said contextual relevance is calculated as:
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where:
α, β, and γ are weighting factors
r n is the hierarchical level of a given topic
P n is the set of parent topics (superclasses) of an item.
7 . The method of claim 2 , wherein said at least one criteria includes path relevance and wherein said path relevance uses information associated with a user's navigation path through the user interface to determine relevant ones of said plurality of advertisements.
8 . The method of claim 7 , wherein said path relevance is calculated as:
r =<r 1 , r 2 , . . . , r n >
where each element of the vector r i is the clickthrough rate for a given possible predecessor page i.
9 . The method of claim 2 , wherein said at least one criteria includes cognitive prominence and where said cognitive prominence criteria divides a screen into zones relating to frequency of being seen by a user.
10 . The method of claim 9 , where said cognitive prominence is calculated by the steps of:
dividing a screen on which said user interface is displayed gridwise into nine zones, and
assigning each zone a weighting factor between 0 and 1.
11 . The method of claim 2 , wherein said step of determining further comprises the steps of:
determining one or more advertisements that maximizes clickthrough rate, maximizes cognitive prominence, maximizes topical relevance (minimizes topical distance), maximizes contextual relevance (minimizes hierarchical distance), and maximizes the cost per click.
12 . The method of claim 2 , further comprising the step of:
displaying at least one advertisement on said user interface as a result of said determining step.
13 . The method of claim 2 , wherein said user interface has a plurality of different interface screens, each interface screen being individually displayable at a time; and
further wherein each interface screen can be reached through at least one predetermined path through others of said plurality of different interface screens,
wherein said step of determining which of a plurality of advertisements to display on a user interface screen based on at least one of the following criteria: topical relevance, contextual relevance, path relevance and cognitive prominence, involves using semantic context associated with a one of said at least one of said predetermined paths used to reach a currently displayed user interface screen.
14 - 29 . (canceled)