Generating semantically enriched user profiles for web personalization

Traditional collaborative filtering generates recommendations for the active user based solely on ratings of items by other users. However, most businesses today have item ontologies that provide a useful source of content descriptors that can be used to enhance the quality of recommendations generated. In this article, we present a novel approach to integrating user rating vectors with an item ontology to generate recommendations. The approach is novel in measuring similarity between users in that it first derives factors, referred to as impacts, driving the observed user behavior and then uses these factors within the similarity computation. In doing so, a more comprehensive user model is learned that is sensitive to the context of the user visit. An evaluation of our recommendation algorithm was carried out using data from an online retailer of movies with over 94,000 movies, 44,000 actors, and 10,000 directors within the item knowledge base. The evaluation showed a statistically significant improvement in the prediction accuracy over traditional collaborative filtering. Additionally, the algorithm was shown to generate recommendations for visitors that belong to sparse sections of the user space, areas where traditional collaborative filtering would generally fail to generate accurate recommendations