PERSONALIZED Information Delivery: AN ANALYSIS of Information Methods.

While automatic filtering of information sounds like a wonderful vision, there are many difficulties in determining what information a person wants to see. The description of what information is of interest is often referred to as a user profile. Broadly defined, this can also be thought of as a rudimentary kind of user model. There are many problems in developing a good model of an Internet user's interests. For example, a variety of factors could be used to describe a person's interests. Generally, people provide a set of words to describe their interests. However, many other sources of information could be used, such as which articles they have read in the past, what organization they work in, or which books they have ordered. While the general topic or content of an article may be important in predicting whether it will match a person's interests, other factors such as familiarity, novelty, importance, or urgency may also be useful in predicting what information a person might want to see. A factor that provides a good description of interests for world news may not be effective for describing a person's research interests.