Intelligent Filtering of Electronic Messages
Dr. Fredrik Kilander, K2LAB
With the ever increasing pressure from providers of electronic
information the possibility of automatic filtering becomes
attractive. The term filtering is usually associated with
weeding which discards the unwanted, but it can just as easily
be regarded as sorting in order of interestingness. Filtering
is also separate from information retrieval in which a
query is aimed at an information store; filtering regards a
continuous message flow as being less predictiable wrt
content and the end user is commonly without premeditated
preferences.
The IntFilter project at DSV has focussed on the
categorization of messages from Usenet News with examples
provided by the end user as the primary source of sorting.
Other systems rely on different means of discrimination and
they will be reviewed along with the workings of PEFNA, the
working prototype system used in IntFilter.