NectaRSS, an RSS feed ranking system that implicitly learns user preferences

Abstract: In this paper a new RSS feed ranking method called NectaRSS is introduced. The system recommends information to a user based on his/her past choices. User preferences are automatically acquired, avoiding explicit feedback, and ranking is based on those preferences distilled to a user profile. NectaRSS uses the well-known vector space model for user profiles and new documents, and compares them using information-retrieval techniques, but introduces a novel method for user profile creation and adaptation from users' past choices. The efficiency of the proposed method has been tested by embedding it into an intelligent aggregator (RSS feed reader), which has been used by different and heterogeneous users. Besides, this paper proves that the ranking of newsitems yielded by NectaRSS improves its quality with user's choices, and its superiority over other algorithms that use a different information representation method.