Combining distributional semantics and entity linking for context-aware content-based recommendation

The effectiveness of content-based recommendation strategies tremendously depends on the representation formalism adopted to model both items and user profiles. As a consequence, techniques for semantic content representation emerged thanks to their ability to filter out the noise and to face with the issues typical of keyword-based representations. This article presents Contextual eVSM (C-eVSM), a content-based context-aware recommendation framework that adopts a novel semantic representation based on distributional models and entity linking techniques. Our strategy is based on two insights: first, entity linking can identify the most relevant concepts mentioned in the text and can easily map them with structured information sources, easily triggering some inference and reasoning on user preferences, while distributional models can provide a lightweight semantics representation based on term cooccurrences that can bring out latent relationships between concepts by just analying their usage patterns in large corpora of data. The resulting framework is fully domain-independent and shows better performance than state-of-the-art algorithms in several experimental settings, confirming the validity of content-based approaches and paving the way for several future research directions.