LIBRA Help

These are the basic steps in using LIBRA

1. Create Your Account
   Choose a user name and a password and click new user to create an account. Once you have created an account, you can login directly in the future. Please note that LIBRA is not very secure . Do not submit any particularly sensitive confidential information. For example, choose a password for LIBRA different from your normal password.
2. Choose a Genre
   Choose a general category of books to consider. Sample genres include literature, science fiction, mystery, and science and technology. You can later choose a different genre to obtain recommendations in a different general category. Libra currently learns and maintains a separate user profile for each genre.
3. Rate Books
   Search for books to rate in order to provide LIBRA with examples of your tastes. LIBRA allows searches based on author, title, ISBN number, or subject. You will then be asked to specify a 1 to 10 rating for any of the books in the selected genre that satisfy your search query. Click on the title of a book to view the Amazon page describing this title. Continue searching and rating books until you believe you have provided LIBRA with a good set of training examples. The more examples you provide, the better profile LIBRA can learn; however, it can frequently recommend good books based on only a few training examples. Consider providing examples of both books that you love as well as books that you hate.
4. Review Ratings
   LIBRA will display all of the books you have currently rated for the current genre. You can change these ratings and resubmit them in order to edit your current set of training examples. LIBRA will maintain your examples for each genre so that in the future you can edit and augment them.
5. Provide Keywords
   In addition to rating books, you can provide LIBRA with keywords in which you have definite interest or disinterest. This information will be added to your profile and used in conjunction with your sample ratings when making recommendations.
6. Get Recommendations
   Once you have rated books and/or provided keywords, you can press "Get LIBRA's Recommendations." Relax and wait a bit and LIBRA will produce a list of recommended books. Click on the title of a book to view the Amazon page describing this title. You can supply your own ratings for the books that LIBRA recommends and submit these additional examples to further hone LIBRA's skill. To submit these ratings, use the button at the bottom of the list of recommendations. By repeatedly rating some of the books that LIBRA recommends and requesting new recommendations based on this additional information, you should improve the quality of the recommendations you receive. In particular, consider providing ratings for recommended examples that you know you would love or hate.
7. Explain Profile
   At the begining of your list of recommendations, LIBRA will give you the option of viewing an explanation, or summary, of your learned profile. Clicking "explain this profile" will present two tables of information; one listing words describing various aspects of a book (e.g. author, title, description, subject) that you find most appealing, and another listing words that you find least appealing. Moreover, clicking "explain" on each of these words will show the books that you rated that caused the word to have such positive or negative influence. Clicking "Change" for a given word will allow you to change the influence of this feature on your recommendations using the keyword facility mentioned above. You can also see variants of your profile explanation that are weighted towards more frequent terms or focused on particular aspects, such as author or subject.
8. Get Disrecommendations
   At the begining of your list of recommendations, LIBRA will give you the option of viewing a list of books it strongly does not recommend. Clicking "least recommended books" will show you a list of disrecommendations, starting with the least recommended. These books can give you a better idea of what LIBRA thinks you do not like. If you actually might like one or more of these books, rate them accordingly and submit these ratings using the button at the bottom of the list of disrecommendations.
9. Explain Recommendation
   For each recommended (or disrecommended) title you can also click "explain this recommendation" to obtain information on why the book was listed. This will produce a table of words describing various aspects of the book that your profile indicates you view most favorably (or most unfavorably for disrecommendations). Moreover, clicking "explain" on each of these words will show the books that you rated that caused the word to have such positive or negative influence. Clicking "Change" for a given word will allow you to change the influence of this feature on your recommendations using the keyword facility mentioned above.
10. Have Patience
    LIBRA is an experimental system and it not fully optimized or debugged. Obtaining recommendations may be slow at times and may even cause the server to time out, giving your browser an error. The system is still under development and should improve over time.