Tag-Aware Matrix Factorization for Research Paper Recommendation

Finding online scientific articles relevant to one’s interests is very challenging due to the increasing number of publications. Hence, scientific paper recommendation has become a significant and timely research topic. Collaborative filtering is a successful recommendation approach, which exploits the ratings given to items by users as a source of information for learning to make accurate recommendations. However, the ratings are often very sparse as in the research paper domain, due to the huge number of publications growing every year. Therefore, more attention has been drawn to hybrid methods that consider both ratings and content information. Nevertheless, most of the hybrid recommendation approaches that are based on text embedding have utilized bag-of-words techniques, which ignore word order and semantic meaning. In this paper, we propose a hybrid approach that leverages deep semantic representation of research papers based on tags. The experimental evaluation is performed on CiteULike, a real and publicly available dataset. The obtained findings show that the proposed model is effective in recommending research papers even when the rating data is very sparse.