Heavyweight Applications of Lightweight User Models: A Look at Collaborative Filtering, Recommender Systems, and Real-Time Personalization

Real-time personalization is one of the goals behind building effective and accurate user models. A wide variety of applications, from graphical user interfaces to information filtering and retrieval systems to electronic commerce displays, can better serve users if they adapt to user wants and needs. Many personalization systems take a heavyweight approach to personalization-extensive modeling of the problem domain, user tasks, and user preferences. While these heavyweight models can be very successful, they can be extremely challenging to build and adapt, and the effort involved can lead system designers to “cut corners” and reduce their fidelity and effectiveness.