TOAST: A topic-oriented tag-based recommender system

Social Annotation Systems have emerged as a popular application with the advance of Web 2.0 technologies. Tags generated by users using arbitrary words to express their own opinions and perceptions on various resources provide a new intermediate dimension between users and resources, which deemed to convey the user preference information. Using clustering for topic extraction and incorporating it with the capture of user preference and resource affiliation is becoming an effective practice in tag-based recommender systems. In this paper, we aim to address these challenges via a topic graph approach. We first propose a Topic Oriented Graph (TOG), which models the user preference and resource affiliation on various topics. Based on the graph, we devise a Topic-Oriented Tag-based Recommendation System (TOAST) by using the preference propagation on the graph. We conduct experiments on two real datasets to demonstrate that our approach outperforms other state-of-the-art algorithms. Copyright © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.