Information filtering agents and collaborative filtering both
attempt to alleviate information overload by identifying
which items a user will find worthwhile. Information
filtering (IF) focuses on the analysis of item content and
the development of a personal user interest profile.
Collaborative filtering (CF) focuses on identification of
other users with similar tastes and the use of their opinions
to recommend items. Each technique has advantages and
limitations that suggest that the two could be beneficially
combined.
This paper shows that a CF framework can be used to
combine personal IF agents and the opinions of a
community of users to produce better recommendations
than either agents or users can produce alone. It also
shows that using CF to create a personal combination of a
set of agents produces better results than either individual
agents or other combination mechanisms. One key
implication of these results is that users can avoid having
to select among agents; they can use them all and let the
CF framework select the best ones for them.