Insert Movie Reference Here: A System to Bridge Conversation and Item-Oriented Web Sites

Item-oriented Web sites maintain repositories of information about things such as books, games, or products. Many of these Web sites offer discussion forums. However, these forums are often disconnected from the rich data available in the item repositories. We describe a system, movie linking, that bridges a movie recommendation Web site and a movieoriented discussion forum. Through automatic detection and an interactive component, the system recognizes references to movies in the forum and adds recommendation data to the forums and conversation threads to movie pages. An eight week observational study shows that the system was able to identify movie references with precision of.93 and recall of.78. Though users reported that the feature was useful, their behavior indicates that the feature was more successful at enriching the interface than at integrating the system. Author Keywords online asynchronous discussion, user interface, recommender syste