Personalization in Digital Libraries: An Intelligent Service based on Semantic User Profiles

Suppose you registered to a large scientific congress and you got from the Web site the conference program containing a long list of papers which will be presented. Which presentations do you choose to attend? Usually either you try to guess the most interesting talks from their titles and authors or you are forced to have a quick look at the conference proceedings. A recommender system able to learn your research interests from the latest papers you wrote or read, and use them to provide suggestions, might be of valuable help for you in this scenario. Content-based recommenders analyze documents previously rated by a target user, and build a profile exploited to recommend new interesting documents. One of the main limitations of traditional keyword-based approaches is that they are unable to capture the semantics of the user interests, due to the natural language ambiguity. We developed a semantic recommender system, called ITem Recommender, able to disambiguate documents before using them to learn the user profile. The Conference Participant Advisor service relies on the profiles learned by ITem Recommender to build a personalized conference program, in which relevant talks are highlighted according to the participant interests.