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# What is an interest?

Yenta determines your interests by scanning your files and clumping together email messages or entire files which seem to be talking about the same thing. Each of these clumps is called an interest, and is what Yenta uses when finding other Yentas whose users seem to be similar to you. Yentas that have found each other and share a particular interest turn into a cluster, and you can send messages to particular individuals in a cluster, or to everyone in the cluster.

You can see what Yenta knows about your interests here. This table shows a number of things about each interest.

- You can assign a name to an interest, which Yenta will use for your convenience when talking to you about this interest. The name you pick is used only by your Yenta; other Yentas know nothing about it.
- Yenta also shows the top five words for any given interest that seem to describe it best; these words are computed from the statistics that Yenta generates in order to figure out your interests.
- The size of an interest is the number of documents which seem to talk about that interest.
- The contacts slot shows how many other Yentas have been found that seem to talk about this interest. If it is zero, no other Yentas have been found for this interest, and you are not currently in a cluster for that interest. If it is greater than zero, you can click on the interest and find out about the cluster.
- Finally, the relevant checkbox allows you to tell Yenta whether some interest that Yenta has found is actually interesting to you---after all, even if Yenta has found some cluster of documents which talks about something, you may not be all that interested in what they're saying. You can click on the checkbox to turn off the interest; Yenta will not try to find others who share the interest with you if you do so.

# Telling Yenta about your interests

The easiest way to tell Yenta about your interests is simply to show it some files that reflect those interests. However, if you have interests that are not reflected by the documents on your computer (perhaps because you have not done anything involving this interest using your computer), you can create a description of your interest and give it to Yenta.

When writing for Yenta, it is important to understand that it only looks at words, and not grammar. Therefore:

- Avoid negative constructions (in other words, don't say "I am not interested in ..."), since Yenta will think you are interested in what you are saying you are not interested in.
- Avoid examples ("One application of this would be..."), since Yenta will think you are interested in the example more than the topic.
- Avoid interesting phrasing ("Coincidentally, ..."), since Yenta will think you are interested in unusual grammatical constructions.

Yenta avoids most problems with understanding your documents by having a large number of them, which it examines for similarities. Since you will not want to write a lengthy document to explain your interest, you need to make it easy for Yenta to understand.

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