PlentyOfFish = PlentyOfData (talk by Thomas Levi)

Date(s): Thursday, February 19
Time: 2:30 pm - 4:00 pm
Location: : University of the Fraser Valley

February 19th, 2:30-4:00 PM, B121 (Abbotsford)

Abstract: As the world’s largest free dating site, Plenty Of Fish would like to be able to match with and allow users to search for people with similar interests. However, we allow our users to enter their interests as free text on their profiles. This presents a difficult problem in clustering, search and machine learning if we want to move beyond simple ‘exact match’ solutions to a deeper archetypal user profiling and thematic search system. Some of the common issues that arise are misspellings, synonyms (e.g. biking, cycling and bicycling) and similar interests (e.g. snowboarding and skiing) on a several million user scale.

In this talk I will demonstrate how we built a system utilizing topic modelling with Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) on a several hundred thousand word vocabulary over ten million+ North American users and explore its applications at POF.

http://www.ufv.ca/math/math-club-talks/