This paper describes a technique for making personalized recommendations from any type of database to a user based on similarities between the interest profile of that user and those of other users. In particular, we discuss the implementation of a networked system called Ringo, which makes personalized recommendations for music albums and artists. Ringo's database of users and artists grows dynamically as more people use the system and enter more information. Four different algorithms for making recommendations by using social information filtering were tested and compared. We present quantitative and qualitative results obtained from the use of Ringo by more than 2000 people.

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Social information filtering: algorithms for automating “word of mouth”

An intelligent automated assistant system engages with the user in an integrated, conversational manner using natural language dialog, and invokes external services when appropriate to obtain information or perform various actions. The system can be implemented using any of a number of different platforms, such as the web, email, smartphone, and the like, or any combination thereof. In one embodiment, the system is based on sets of interrelated domains and tasks, and employs additional functionally powered by external services with which the system can interact.

Intelligent Automated Assistant

A system and method provides universal access to voice-based documents containing information formatted using MIME and HTML standards using customized extensions for voice information access and navigation. These voice documents are linked using HTML hyper-links that are accessible to subscribers using voice commands, touch-tone inputs and other selection means. These voice documents and components in them are addressable using HTML anchors embedding HTML universal resource locators (URLs) rendering them universally accessible over the Internet. This collection of connected documents forms a voice web. The voice web includes subscriber-specific documents including speech training files for speaker dependent speech recognition, voice print files for authenticating the identity of a user and personal preference and attribute files for customizing other aspects of the system in accordance with a specific subscriber.

System and method for providing and using universally accessible voice and speech data files

The various methods and devices described herein relate to devices which, in at least certain embodiments, may include one or more sensors for providing data relating to user activity and at least one processor for causing the device to respond based on the user activity which was determined, at least in part, through the sensors. The response by the device may include a change of state of the device, and the response may be automatically performed after the user activity is determined.

Automated Response to and Sensing of User Activity in Portable Devices

The disclosed system implements a novel method for personalized filtering of information and automated generation of user-specific recommendations. The system uses a statistical latent class model, also known as Probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis, to integrate data including textual and other content descriptions of items to be searched, user profiles, demographic information, query logs of previous searches, and explicit user ratings of items. The disclosed system learns one or more statistical models based on available data. The learning may be reiterated once additional data is available. The statistical model, once learned, is utilized in various ways: to make predictions about item relevance and user preferences on un-rated items, to generate recommendation lists of items, to generate personalized search result lists, to disambiguate a users query, to refine a search, to compute similarities between items or users, and for data mining purposes such as identifying user communities.

System and method for personalized search, information filtering, and for generating recommendations utilizing statistical latent class models

A methodology for retrieving textual data objects is disclosed. The information is treated in the statistical domain by presuming that there is an underlying, latent semantic structure in the usage of words in the data objects. Estimates to this latent structure are utilized to represent and retrieve objects. A user query is recouched in the new statistical domain and then processed in the computer system to extract the underlying meaning to respond to the query.

Scott Craig Deerwester

Papers

Computer information retrieval using latent semantic structure

Richard Harshman Indexing by Latent Semantic Analysis