Anisotropic propagation of user interests in ontology-based user models

摘要

This work contributes to the development of ontology-based user models, devised as overlays over conceptual hierarchies derived from domain ontologies. We tackle the problem of propagation of user interests in such a conceptual hierarchy. In addition to accounting for the hierarchical structure of the domain and the type and amount of feedback provided by the user, the principal contributions introduced in this work are: (i) propagation which enables propagation among siblings, in addition to vertical propagation among ancestors and descendants; (ii) vertical propagation which permits user interests to be propagated differently upward and downward; (iii) which introduces the possibility to propagate differently according to various contexts for specific applications; (iv) , i.e. preserving the user interest values when adding or removing a node from the conceptual hierarchy. Our approach supports finer recommendation modalities and contributes to the resolution of the cold start problem, since it allows for propagation from a small number of initial concepts to other related domain concepts by exploiting the conceptual hierarchy of the domain. A field evaluation confirmed the effectiveness of our approach w.r.t. the traditional vertical propagation.