REFER Seminar
Computer Science Department
Worcester Polytechnic Institute 

Date: Sept. 27, 1999

Speaker: Mark Claypool

Title: "Combining Content-Based and Collaborative Filters 
in an Online Newspaper" by Mark Claypool, Anuja Gokhale, 
Tim Miranda, Pavel Murnikov, Dmitry Netes, Matthew Sartin

(presented at the ACM SIGIR '99 Workshop on Recommender Systems) 

Abstract

  The explosive growth of mailing lists, Web sites and Usenet news
  demands effective filtering solutions.  Collaborative filtering
  combines the informed opinions of humans to make personalized,
  accurate predictions.  Content-based filtering uses the speed of
  computers to make complete, fast predictions.  In this work, we
  present a new filtering approach that combines the coverage and speed
  of content-filters with the depth of collaborative filtering.  We
  apply our research approach to an online newspaper, an as yet untapped
  opportunity for filters useful to the wide-spread news reading
  populace.  We present the design of our filtering system and describe
  the results from preliminary experiments that suggest merits to our
  approach.