To help address pressing problems with information overload, researchers have developed personal agents to provide assistance to users in navigating the Web. To provide suggestions, such agents rely on user profiles representing interests and preferences, which makes acquiring and modeling interest categories a critical component in their design. Existing profiling approaches have only partially tackled the characteristics that distinguish user profiling from related tasks. The authors’ technique generates readable user profiles that accurately capture interests, starting from observations of user behavior on the Web.