On Wed, Jan 27, 2010 at 6:18 PM, Ted Dunning <ted.dunn...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > a) whether items that are retrieved/recommended are opaque or have > attributes (is the process content-based?) >
Well this is the part we all are agreeing on - we're all talking about the "new" (to our framework) technique of including content attributes. Good here. > b) whether the basis for retrieving/recommending items is an explicit query > (of whatever form) or is an implicit query formed by the user's historical > actions (is this search or recommendation?) > I'm *not* suggesting we consider explicitly chose attributes that the user enters on their own. That is completely a search, not a recommendation, and isn't what the recommendation part of Mahout is about. I'm talking about queries generated in some way from the content of the thing which wants to have recommendations given to it (the webpage which wants ads, the job posting which wants applicants, the user who has a profile who wants XYZ, etc...). Definitely implicit, in terms of what users *do*, but possibly fairly explicit in terms of what the *are*. > c) whether the retrieval/recommendation of items uses the behavior of all > users to sharpen the results (is this a social algorithm or not?) > Right, this is the part which makes it a CF-based approach, and I would like us to not get caught up in this being the focal point of a recommendation system. > d) what do we call the system (recommendation, collaborative filtering, > search or whatever) > I think we're all cool with calling it a recommendation if it's 1) not specifically user-driven (your point b. above), yet results of some type are delivered. -jake
