A Referral-Based Recommender System for E-commerce

Abstract

The thesis is intended to develop the technology and infrastructure to allow people to share knowledge with and learn from each other. A special kind of multiagent system, called multiagent referral system (MARS), is proposed. In MARS, each user is assigned a software agent, and software agents help automate the process of expertise location by a series of 'referral chains.' Unlike most previous approaches, our architecture is totally distributed and preserves the privacy and autonomy of their users. These agents learn models of each other in terms of expertise (ability to produce correct domain answers), and sociability (ability to produce accurate referrals).