A Heuristic Method for Collaborative Recommendation Using Hierarchical User Profiles

Document recommendation in information retrieval is a well known problem. Recommending a profile in order to personalize document search is a less common approach. In this paper a specific solution to profile recommendation is proposed, by use of knowledge integration methods. A hierarchical user profile is defined to represent the user. For each new user joining an information retrieval system, a prepared non-empty profile is assigned based on other similar users. To create such a profile, knowledge integration methods are used. A set of postulates are proposed to describe such representative profile. Criteria measures are used to determine if a solution to a specific algorithm satisfies these postulates. Three integration algorithms are proposed and evaluated, including a heuristic algorithm. In future research, these algorithms will be used in a practical system.