The Traits of the Personable
  Information personalization is fertile ground for application of AI techniques. In this article I relate personalization to the ability to capture partial information in an information-seeking interaction. The specific focus is on personalizing interactions at web sites. Using ideas from partial evaluation and explanation-based generalization, I present a modeling methodology for reasoning about personalization. This approach helps identify seven tiers of `personable traits' in web sites. 
Naren Ramakrishnan