Concept-based item representations for a cross-lingual content-based recommendation process

The growth of the Web is the most influential factor that contributes to the increasing importance of text retrieval and filtering systems. On one hand, the Web is becoming more and more multilingual, and on the other hand users themselves are becoming increasingly polyglot. In this context, platforms for intelligent information access as search engines or recommender systems need to evolve to deal with this increasing amount of multilingual information. This paper proposes a content-based recommender system able to generate cross-lingual recommendations. The idea is to exploit user preferences learned in a given language, to suggest item in another language. The main intuition behind the work is that, differently from keywords which are inherently language dependent, concepts are stable across different languages, allowing to deal with multilingual and cross lingual scenarios. We propose four knowledge-based strategies to build concept-based representation of items, by relying on the knowledge contained in two knowledge sources, i.e. Wikipedia and BabelNet. We learn user profiles by leveraging the different concept-based representations, in order to define a cross-lingual recommendation process. The empirical evaluation carried out on two state of the art datasets, DBbook and Movielens, shows that concept-based approaches are suitable to provide cross-lingual recommendations, even though there is not a clear advantage of using one of the different proposed representations. However, it emerges that most of the times the approaches based on BabelNet outperform those based on Wikipedia, which clearly shows the advantage of using a native multilingual knowledge source. (C) 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.