Patent ID: 7328216

Claim:
A method in a computer system for generating a recommendation list of desired items from a set of data including at least one of: items, content descriptors for the items, user profiles about transactions, prior searches, user ratings and user actions, to generate a recommendation list of desired items, comprising the steps of: statistically analyzing the set of data to learn semantic associations between words within specific items of the set of data, storing the learned semantic associations in computer hardware; computing probabilities of each learned semantic association; receiving into the computer system for generating a recommendation list: an actual user profile, a user query; and a request to generate at least one recommendation list, items in the recommendation list being ranked by their likelihood of being the desired items; computing a probability of relevance of each item in the set of data to the actual user profile and said user query, the step of computing a probability of relevance including combining the learned semantic associations and the actual user profile; and generating at least one recommendation list of desired items.