Learning User Profiles from Text in e-Commerce

Exploring digital collections to find information relevant to a user's interests is a challenging task. Algorithms designed to solve this relevant information problem base their relevance computations on user profiles in which representations of the users' interests are maintained. This paper presents a new method, based on the classical Rocchio algorithm for text categorization, able to discover user preferences from the analysis of textual descriptions of items in online catalogues of ecommerce Web sites. Experiments have been carried out on a dataset of real users, and results have been compared with those obtained using an Inductive Logic Programming (ILP) approach and a probabilistic one