Automatic Learning of User Profiles — Towards the Personalisation of Agent Services

Agent technology is able to provide increasingly more services for individuals, groups and organisations. Services such as information finding, filtering and presentation, service/contract negotiation, and electronic commerce are now possible. User profiling is fundamental to the personalisation of this technology. This paper describes experimental work conducted to investigate user profiling within a framework for personal agents. In particular investigations were aimed at discovering whether user interests could be automatically classified through the use of several heuristics. The results highlighted the need for minimal user feedback, and the need to consider the implications for the role of machine learning in user profiling.