Algorithms and Architecture for Real-time Recommendations at News UK

Recommendation systems are recognised as being hugely important in industry, and the area is now well understood. At News UK, there is a requirement to be able to quickly generate recommendations for users on news items as they are published. However, little has been published about systems that can generate recommendations in response to changes in recommendable items and user behaviour in a very short space of time. In this paper we describe a new algorithm for updating collaborative filtering models incrementally, and demonstrate its effectiveness on clickstream data from The Times. We also describe the architecture that allows recommendations to be generated on the fly, and how we have made each component scalable. The system is currently being used in production at News UK.

Metalinguistic Information Extraction for Terminology

This paper describes and evaluates the Metalinguistic Operation Processor (MOP) system for automatic compilation of metalinguistic information from technical and scientific documents. This system is designed to extract non-standard terminological resources that we have called Metalinguistic Information Databases (or MIDs), in order to help update changing glossaries, knowledge bases and ontologies, as well as to reflect the metastable dynamics of special-domain knowledge.