Contextual EVSM: A content-based context-aware recommendation framework based on distributional semantics

In several domains contextual information plays a key role in the recommendation task, since factors such as user location, time of the day, user mood, weather, etc., clearly affect user perception for a particular item. However, traditional recommendation approaches do not take into account contextual information, and this can limit the goodness of the suggestions. In this paper we extend the enhanced Vector Space Model (eVSM) framework in order to model contextual information as well. Specifically, we propose two different context-aware approaches: in the first one we adapt the microprofiling technique, already evaluated in collaborative filtering, to content-based recommendations. Next, we define a contextual modeling technique based on distributional semantics: it builds a context-aware user profile that merges user preferences with a semantic vector space representation of the context itself. In the experimental evaluation we carried out an extensive series of tests in order to determine the best-performing configuration among the proposed ones. We also evaluated Contextual eVSM against a state of the art dataset, and it emerged that our framework overcomes all the baselines in most of the experimental settings. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013.