Synthese Recommender December 16, 2008
Posted by Andre Vellino in CISTI, Collaborative filtering, Digital library, General, Recommender.4 comments
I have finally finished a first version of the Synthese Recommender for journal articles. It is now up on the CISTI Lab web site, complete with a flash video tour, in lieu of documentation.
For the recommender experts among you – there’s nothing fundamentally new here that you don’t know about already: the Synthese Recommender applies user-based collaborative filtering (implemented using Taste) with article citations as a substitute for user-data to address the cold-start problem. This has been done before in TechLens. And, I should add, TechLens (now in its third iteration) is quite a bit more full-featured and polished.
My aim was modest: to gather data about how well a simple collaborative filtering recommends articles to researchers in diverse scientific fields. That will give me a baseline from which to repeat the experiment – with a content-based recommender, multi-dimensional ratings, and an explanation feature. I’m hoping this will tell me how much more valuable each element is to the overall user-experience. My hypthesis: a hockey-stick curve in usefulness as more features are added. Explanations, I think, are going to make all the difference.
