Combining Content-Based and Collaborative Filters in an Online Newspaper

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.