Yenta is still under active development, but this particular page is not. If you're interested in current research papers about Yenta, or obtaining a copy of Yenta, please start here instead. This page is one of many that were written in late 1994 and early 1995, and are being preserved here for historical purposes. If you're viewing this page, you probably found it via an old link or are interested in the history of how Yenta came to be. These pages have not been actively maintained since 1995, so you'll find all sorts of older descriptions which may not match the current system, citations to old papers and old results, and so forth. |
First and foremost, there are privacy implications to having agents read people's mail, if those agents are talking to others. This drives the incorporation of cryptographic mechanisms into the basic architecture.
Second, most of the useful content of mail is in the body, not the various (mostly) machine-parsable headers. This requires relatively sophisticated analysis of content to determine semantic distance.
Finally, this automated scanning means that there is a chance for serendipity to play a role. If Yenta had to ask the user to exhaustively list his or her interests, for example, the user would like tire of the chore--and omit things accidentally, too. By scanning what mail the user receives and, probably more important, sends, there is a chance to pick up on some topic that the user would not think to express explicitly, and use that to make a match the user would not have thought to request.
Lenny Foner Last modified: Sat Dec 10 17:48:51 1994