Techniques for providing a people recommendation system for predicting and recommending relevant people (or other entities) to include in a conversation based on contextual indicators. In an exemplary embodiment, email recipient recommendations may be suggested based on contextual signals, e.g., project names, body text, existing recipients, current date and time, etc. In an aspect, a plurality of properties including ranked key phrases are associated with profiles corresponding to personal entities. Aggregated profiles are analyzed using first- and second-layer processing techniques. The recommendations may be provided to the user reactively, e.g., in response to a specific query by the user to the people recommendation system, or proactively, e.g., based on the context of what the user is currently working on, in the absence of a specific query by the user.