A personalized and context-aware news offer for mobile devices

For classical domains, such as movies, recommender systems have proven their usefulness. But recommending news is more challenging due to the short life span of news content and the demand for up-to-date recommendations. This paper presents a news recommendation service with a content-based algorithm that uses features of a search engine for content processing and indexing, and a collaborative filtering algorithm for serendipity. The extension towards a context-aware algorithm is made to assess the information value of context in a mobile environment through a user study. Analyzing interaction behavior and feedback of users on three recommendation approaches shows that interaction with the content is crucial input for user modeling. Context-aware recommendations using time and device type as context data outperform traditional recommendations with an accuracy gain dependent on the contextual situation. These findings demonstrate that the user experience of news services can be improved by a personalized context-aware news offer

Towards Serendipity for Content–Based Recommender Systems

Recommender systems are intelligent applications build to predict the rating or preference that a user would give to an item. One of the fundamental recommendation methods in the content-based method that predict ratings by exploiting attributes about the users and items such as users’ profile and textual content of items. A current issue faces by recommender systems based on this method is that the systems seem to recommend too similar items to what users have known. Thus, creating over-specialisation issues, in which a self-referential loop is created that leaves user in their own circle of finding and never get expose to new items. In order for these systems to be of significance used, it is important that not only relevant items been recommender, but the items must be also interesting and serendipitous. Having a serendipitous recommendation let users explore new items that they least expect. This has resulted in the issues of serendipity in recommender systems. However, it is difficult to define serendipity because in recommender system, there is no consensus definition for this term. Most of researchers define serendipity based on their research purposes. From the reviews, majority shows that unexpected as the important aspect in defining serendipity. Thus, in this paper, we aim to formally define the concept of serendipity in recommender systems based on the literature work done. We also reviewed few approaches that apply serendipity in the content-based methods in recommendation. Techniques that used Linked Open Data (LOD) approaches seems to be a good candidate to find relevant, unexpected and novel item in a large dataset.

Considering temporal aspects in recommender systems: a survey

Under embargo until: 2023-07-04The widespread use of temporal aspects in user modeling indicates their importance, and their consideration showed to be highly effective in various domains related to user modeling, especially in recommender systems. Still, past and ongoing research, spread over several decades, provided multiple ad-hoc solutions, but no common understanding of the issue. There is no standardization and there is often little commonality in considering temporal aspects in different applications. This may ultimately lead to the problem that application developers define ad-hoc solutions for their problems at hand, sometimes missing or neglecting aspects that proved to be effective in similar cases. Therefore, a comprehensive survey of the consideration of temporal aspects in recommender systems is required. In this work, we provide an overview of various time-related aspects, categorize existing research, present a temporal abstraction and point to gaps that require future research. We anticipate this survey will become a reference point for researchers and practitioners alike when considering the potential application of temporal aspects in their personalized applications.acceptedVersio

A Systematic Literature Review of Linked Data-based Recommender Systems

Recommender Systems (RS) are software tools that use analytic technologies to suggest different items of interest to an end user. Linked Data is a set of best practices for publishing and connecting structured data on the Web. This paper presents a systematic literature review to summarize the state of the art in recommender systems that use structured data published as Linked Data for providing recommendations of items from diverse domains. It considers the most relevant research problems addressed and classifies RS according to how Linked Data has been used to provide recommendations. Furthermore, it analyzes contributions, limitations, application domains, evaluation techniques, and directions proposed for future research. We found that there are still many open challenges with regard to RS based on Linked Data in order to be efficient for real applications. The main ones are personalization of recommendations; use of more datasets considering the heterogeneity introduced; creation of new hybrid RS for adding information; definition of more advanced similarity measures that take into account the large amount of data in Linked Data datasets; and implementation of testbeds to study evaluation techniques and to assess the accuracy scalability and computational complexity of RS

Content Recommendation Through Linked Data

Nowadays, people can easily obtain a huge amount of information from the Web, but often they have no criteria to discern it. This issue is known as information overload. Recommender systems are software tools to suggest interesting items to users and can help them to deal with a vast amount of information. Linked Data is a set of best practices to publish data on the Web, and it is the basis of the Web of Data, an interconnected global dataspace. This thesis discusses how to discover information useful for the user from the vast amount of structured data, and notably Linked Data available on the Web. The work addresses this issue by considering three research questions: how to exploit existing relationships between resources published on the Web to provide recommendations to users; how to represent the user and his context to generate better recommendations for the current situation; and how to effectively visualize the recommended resources and their relationships. To address the first question, the thesis proposes a new algorithm based on Linked Data which exploits existing relationships between resources to recommend related resources. The algorithm was integrated into a framework to deploy and evaluate Linked Data based recommendation algorithms. In fact, a related problem is how to compare them and how to evaluate their performance when applied to a given dataset. The user evaluation showed that our algorithm improves the rate of new recommendations, while maintaining a satisfying prediction accuracy. To represent the user and their context, this thesis presents the Recommender System Context ontology, which is exploited in a new context-aware approach that can be used with existing recommendation algorithms. The evaluation showed that this method can significantly improve the prediction accuracy. As regards the problem of effectively visualizing the recommended resources and their relationships, this thesis proposes a visualization framework for DBpedia (the Linked Data version of Wikipedia) and mobile devices, which is designed to be extended to other datasets. In summary, this thesis shows how it is possible to exploit structured data available on the Web to recommend useful resources to users. Linked Data were successfully exploited in recommender systems. Various proposed approaches were implemented and applied to use cases of Telecom Italia