More like *these*? (recommendation system)

[Andrew Ingram <an...@andrewingram.net>]

Hi all,
I'm trying various methods of building a user-specific product
recommendation system and one idea is to use solr's MLT functionality.

For each customer I have a list of items they've bought, and I want to find
similar items that are new to the site.

The problem is that MLT operates on each result found (if I send it an id,
it will return a list for that id, if I send it lots of ids it will return a
list for EACH result), what I really want is to return a single list based
on the combined factors of all items return by the initial query.

So if I search for "id:1 OR id:2 OR id:3", I want the MLT result to be a
single list of items, rather than 3 lists.

Is this possible without writing a completely new handler?

Regards,
Andrew Ingram

Re: More like *these*? (recommendation system)

[Grant Ingersoll <gs...@apache.org>]

You might also look at Mahout, and specifically Taste: http://lucene.apache.org/mahout/taste.html 
.  Of course, it is a far different approach from MLT.

-Grant

On Jul 31, 2009, at 8:08 AM, Andrew Ingram wrote:

> Hi all,
> I'm trying various methods of building a user-specific product
> recommendation system and one idea is to use solr's MLT functionality.
>
> For each customer I have a list of items they've bought, and I want  
> to find
> similar items that are new to the site.
>
> The problem is that MLT operates on each result found (if I send it  
> an id,
> it will return a list for that id, if I send it lots of ids it will  
> return a
> list for EACH result), what I really want is to return a single list  
> based
> on the combined factors of all items return by the initial query.
>
> So if I search for "id:1 OR id:2 OR id:3", I want the MLT result to  
> be a
> single list of items, rather than 3 lists.
>
> Is this possible without writing a completely new handler?
>
> Regards,
> Andrew Ingram

--------------------------
Grant Ingersoll
http://www.lucidimagination.com/

Search the Lucene ecosystem (Lucene/Solr/Nutch/Mahout/Tika/Droids)  
using Solr/Lucene:
http://www.lucidimagination.com/search

Re: More like *these*? (recommendation system)

[Avlesh Singh <av...@gmail.com>]

>
> So if I search for "id:1 OR id:2 OR id:3", I want the MLT result to be a
> single list of items, rather than 3 lists.
>
I did not understand this. Isn't the "q" parameter in MLT handler supposed
to serve the same objective. "/mlt?q=(id:1 OR id:2 OR
id:3)&mlt.fl=mlt-field&mlt.mintf=1" just works fine.

Cheers
Avlesh

On Fri, Jul 31, 2009 at 5:38 PM, Andrew Ingram <an...@andrewingram.net>wrote:

> Hi all,
> I'm trying various methods of building a user-specific product
> recommendation system and one idea is to use solr's MLT functionality.
>
> For each customer I have a list of items they've bought, and I want to find
> similar items that are new to the site.
>
> The problem is that MLT operates on each result found (if I send it an id,
> it will return a list for that id, if I send it lots of ids it will return
> a
> list for EACH result), what I really want is to return a single list based
> on the combined factors of all items return by the initial query.
>
> So if I search for "id:1 OR id:2 OR id:3", I want the MLT result to be a
> single list of items, rather than 3 lists.
>
> Is this possible without writing a completely new handler?
>
> Regards,
> Andrew Ingram
>

Re: More like *these*? (recommendation system)

[Edwin Stauthamer <es...@emidconsult.com>]

You don't have to create a new "handler" for this... just do some
preprocessing on the resultset that comes back on your first "id:1 OR id:2
OR id:3" query.
So
- post your query
- get the relevant text-nodes from the resultset (XSL-processing is great
for that).
- Combine the text
- Send that text as one query back to Solr

You can build in that logic in your frontend or use some "layer" for this.

We (Emid Consult) have created a product that does these things for us we
call SEAL. SEAL stands for Search Engine Abstraction Layer (implemented in
PHP). The searchengine specific querycooking or performing extra processing
for added functionality (like "More like this") is done in that layer. SEAL
now can site between the frontend and some search engine (like Solr,
Autonomy IDOL or Exalead).

On Fri, Jul 31, 2009 at 2:08 PM, Andrew Ingram <an...@andrewingram.net>wrote:

> Hi all,
> I'm trying various methods of building a user-specific product
> recommendation system and one idea is to use solr's MLT functionality.
>
> For each customer I have a list of items they've bought, and I want to find
> similar items that are new to the site.
>
> The problem is that MLT operates on each result found (if I send it an id,
> it will return a list for that id, if I send it lots of ids it will return
> a
> list for EACH result), what I really want is to return a single list based
> on the combined factors of all items return by the initial query.
>
> So if I search for "id:1 OR id:2 OR id:3", I want the MLT result to be a
> single list of items, rather than 3 lists.
>
> Is this possible without writing a completely new handler?
>
> Regards,
> Andrew Ingram
>



-- 
Met vriendelijke groet / Kind regards,

Edwin Stauthamer
Adviser Search & Collaboration
Emid Consult
T: +31 (0) 70 8870700
M: +31 (0) 6 4555 4994
E: estauthamer@emidconsult.com
I: http://www.emidconsult.com