Recommender systems improve access to relevant products and information by making personalized suggestions based on previous examples of a user's likes and dislikes. Most existing recommender systems use collaborative filtering methods that base recommendations on other users' preferences. By contrast, content-based methods use information about an item itself to make suggestions. This approach has the advantage of being able to recommend previously unrated items to users with unique interests and to provide explanations for its recommendations. We describe a content-based book recommending system that utilizes information extraction and a machine-learning algorithm for text categorization. Initial experimental results demonstrate that this approach can produce accurate recommendations.

While the vast majority of clustering algorithms are partitional, many real world datasets have inherently overlapping clusters. Several approaches to finding overlapping clusters have come from work on analysis of biological datasets. In this paper, we interpret an overlapping clustering model proposed by Segal et al. [23] as a generalization of Gaussian mixture models, and we extend it to an overlapping clustering model based on mixtures of any regular exponential family distribution and the corresponding Bregman divergence. We provide the necessary algorithm modifications for this extension, and present results on synthetic data as well as subsets of 20-Newsgroups and EachMovie datasets.

In this paper we consider the problem of building a system to predict readability of natural-language documents. Our system is trained using diverse features based on syntax and language models which are generally indicative of readability. The experimental results on a dataset of documents from a mix of genres show that the predictions of the learned system are more accurate than the predictions of naive human judges when compared against the predictions of linguistically-trained expert human judges. The experiments also compare the performances of different learning algorithms and different types of feature sets when used for predicting readability. 1