Systematic Evaluation of Social Recommendation Systems: Challenges and Future

The issue of information overload could be effectively managed with the help of intelligent system which is capable of proactively supervising the users in accessing relevant or useful information in a tailored way, by pruning the large space of possible options. But the key challenge lies in what all information can be collected and assimilated to make effective recommendations. This paper discusses reasons for evolution of recommender systems leading to transition from traditional to social information based recommendations. Social Recommender System (SRS) exploits social contextual information in the form of social links of users, social tags, user-generated data that contain huge supplemental information about items or services that are expected to be of interest of user or about features of items. Therefore, having tremendous potential for improving recommendation quality. Systematic literature review has been done for SRS by categorizing various kinds of social-contextual information into explicit and implicit user-item information. This paper also analyses key aspects of any generic recommender system namely Domain, Personalization Levels, Privacy and Trustworthiness, Recommender algorithms to give a better understanding to researchers new in this field. Keywords—Social Recommender System; Social Tagging; Social Contextual Information