3.2 Basics of Content-based Recommender Systems
Systems implementing a content-based recommendation approach analyze a set of
documents and/or descriptions of items previously rated by a user, and build a model
or profile of user interests based on the features of the objects rated by that user [63].
The profile is a structured representation of user interests, adopted to recommend
new interesting items. The recommendation process basically consists in matching
up the attributes of the user profile against the attributes of a content object. The re-
sult is a relevance judgment that represents the user’s level of interest in that object.
If a profile accurately reflects user preferences, it is of tremendous advantage for
the effectiveness of an information access process. For instance, it could be used to
filter search results by deciding whether a user is interested in a specific Web page
or not and, in the negative case, preventing it from being displayed.