Automated Information Filtering (IF) and Information Retrieval (IR) systems are acquiring increasing prominence. Unfortunately, most attempts to produce effective IF/IR systems are either expensive or unsuccessful. Systems fall prey to the extremely high dimensionality of the domain. Numerous attempts have been made to reduce this dimensionality. However, many involve oversimplifications and naïve assumptions about the nature of the data, or rely on linguistic aspects like semantics and word lists that cannot possibly be relied upon in multi-cultural domains like the Internet.
