The system implements a novel method for personalized filtering of information and automated generation of user-specific recommendations. The system uses a statistical latent class model, also known as Probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis, to integrate data including textual and other content descriptions of items to be searched, user profiles, demographic information, query logs of previous searches, and explicit user ratings of items. The system learns one or more statistical models based on available data. The learning may be reiterated once additional data is available. The statistical model, once learned, is utilized in various ways: to make predictions about item relevance and user preferences on un-rated items, to generate recommendation lists of items, to generate personalized search result lists, to disambiguate a users query, to refine a search, to compute similarities between items or users, and for data mining purposes such as identifying user communities.