Machine Learning of User Profiles: Representational Issues [article]

Eric Bloedorn , Inderjeet Mani, T. Richard MacMillan (MITRE Corporation)
1997 arXiv   pre-print
As more information becomes available electronically, tools for finding information of interest to users becomes increasingly important. The goal of the research described here is to build a system for generating comprehensible user profiles that accurately capture user interest with minimum user interaction. The research described here focuses on the importance of a suitable generalization hierarchy and representation for learning profiles which are predictively accurate and comprehensible. In
more » ... our experiments we evaluated both traditional features based on weighted term vectors as well as subject features corresponding to categories which could be drawn from a thesaurus. Our experiments, conducted in the context of a content-based profiling system for on-line newspapers on the World Wide Web (the IDD News Browser), demonstrate the importance of a generalization hierarchy and the promise of combining natural language processing techniques with machine learning (ML) to address an information retrieval (IR) problem.
arXiv:cmp-lg/9712002v2 fatcat:5a5l6vakdfh45iy76uusxh5yca