Exploiting Contextual Information In Recommender Systems

Recommender Systems help an on-line user to tame information overload and are being used now in complex domains where it could be beneficial to exploit context-awareness, e.g., in travel recommendation. Technically, in Recommender Systems we can interpret context as a set of constraints or preferences over the usage of items determined by the contextual conditions (e.g., today it is raining or the user is in a particular location). In fact, there is a lack of approaches to deal effectively with contextual data. This thesis investigates some approaches to exploit context in Recommender Systems. It provides a general architecture of context-aware Recommender Systems and analyzes separate components of this model. The main focus is to investigate new approaches that can bring a real added value to users. In this paper I also describe my initial results on item selection and item weighting for context-dependent Collaborative Filtering (CF). Moreover, I shall present my ongoing research on CF hybridization using context.