  As more information becomes available electronically, tools for finding
information of interest to users becomes increasingly important. The goal of
the research described here is to build a system for generating comprehensible
user profiles that accurately capture user interest with minimum user
interaction. The research described here focuses on the importance of a
suitable generalization hierarchy and representation for learning profiles
which are predictively accurate and comprehensible. In our experiments we
evaluated both traditional features based on weighted term vectors as well as
subject features corresponding to categories which could be drawn from a
thesaurus. Our experiments, conducted in the context of a content-based
profiling system for on-line newspapers on the World Wide Web (the IDD News
Browser), demonstrate the importance of a generalization hierarchy and the
promise of combining natural language processing techniques with machine
learning (ML) to address an information retrieval (IR) problem.
