A wide area network information filter

A discussion is given on an intelligent wide area network-based clipping service used as a test-bed for the development and effectiveness measurement of high-performance retrieval algorithms. The system taps news wire and other information sources aperiodically, several times daily. It maintains a local 100 Mbyte news database that changes at a rate of 10 Mbytes per day. The system stores and manages user interest profiles, each of which includes several query texts. News items are selected for presentation by a completely automatic four-stage information filtering process; expert system rules and database knowledge criteria are used in the first three stages; vector-space ranking is used in the final stage. News items are actively and selectively disseminated to users via electronic mail.<
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