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Ontological User Profiling in Recommender Systems

Ontological User Profiling in Recommender Systems
Ontological User Profiling in Recommender Systems
We explore a novel ontological approach to user profiling within recommender systems, working on the problem of recommending on-line academic research papers. Our two experimental systems, Quickstep and Foxtrot, create user profiles from unobtrusively monitored behaviour and relevance feedback, representing the profiles in terms of a research paper topic ontology. A novel profile visualization approach is taken to acquire profile feedback. Research papers are classified using ontological classes and collaborative recommendation algorithms used to recommend papers seen by similar people on their current topics of interest. Two small-scale experiments, with 24 subjects over 3 months, and a large-scale experiment, with 260 subjects over an academic year, are conducted to evaluate different aspects of our approach. Ontological inference is shown to improve user profiling, external ontological knowledge used to successfully bootstrap a recommender system and profile visualization employed to improve profiling accuracy. The overall performance of our ontological recommender systems are also presented and favourably compared to other systems in the literature.
Agent, Machine learning, Ontology, Personalization, Recommender systems, User profiling, User modelling
54-88
Middleton, Stuart
404b62ba-d77e-476b-9775-32645b04473f
Shadbolt, N.R.
5c5acdf4-ad42-49b6-81fe-e9db58c2caf7
De Roure, D.C.
02879140-3508-4db9-a7f4-d114421375da
Middleton, Stuart
404b62ba-d77e-476b-9775-32645b04473f
Shadbolt, N.R.
5c5acdf4-ad42-49b6-81fe-e9db58c2caf7
De Roure, D.C.
02879140-3508-4db9-a7f4-d114421375da

Middleton, Stuart, Shadbolt, N.R. and De Roure, D.C. (2004) Ontological User Profiling in Recommender Systems. ACM Transactions on Information Systems, 22 (1), 54-88.

Record type: Article

Abstract

We explore a novel ontological approach to user profiling within recommender systems, working on the problem of recommending on-line academic research papers. Our two experimental systems, Quickstep and Foxtrot, create user profiles from unobtrusively monitored behaviour and relevance feedback, representing the profiles in terms of a research paper topic ontology. A novel profile visualization approach is taken to acquire profile feedback. Research papers are classified using ontological classes and collaborative recommendation algorithms used to recommend papers seen by similar people on their current topics of interest. Two small-scale experiments, with 24 subjects over 3 months, and a large-scale experiment, with 260 subjects over an academic year, are conducted to evaluate different aspects of our approach. Ontological inference is shown to improve user profiling, external ontological knowledge used to successfully bootstrap a recommender system and profile visualization employed to improve profiling accuracy. The overall performance of our ontological recommender systems are also presented and favourably compared to other systems in the literature.

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More information

Published date: January 2004
Keywords: Agent, Machine learning, Ontology, Personalization, Recommender systems, User profiling, User modelling
Organisations: Web & Internet Science, Electronics & Computer Science, IT Innovation

Identifiers

Local EPrints ID: 258926
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/258926
PURE UUID: 4bce22d8-1701-4954-bd82-688c871c49e6
ORCID for Stuart Middleton: ORCID iD orcid.org/0000-0001-8305-8176
ORCID for D.C. De Roure: ORCID iD orcid.org/0000-0001-9074-3016

Catalogue record

Date deposited: 05 Mar 2004
Last modified: 15 Mar 2024 03:08

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Contributors

Author: N.R. Shadbolt
Author: D.C. De Roure ORCID iD

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