Ontology-based news recommendation

Abstract

Recommending news items is traditionally done by term-based algorithms like TF-IDF. This paper concentrates on the benefits of recommending news items using a domain ontology instead of using a term-based approach. For this purpose, we propose Athena, which is an extension to the existing Hermes framework. Athena employs a user profile to store terms or concepts found in news items browsed by the user. Based on this information, the framework uses a traditional method based on TF-IDF, and several ontology-based methods to recommend new articles to the user. The paper concludes with the evaluation of the different methods, which shows that the new ontology-based method that we propose in this paper performs better (w.r.t. accuracy, precision, and recall) than the traditional method and, with the exception of one measure (recall), also better than the other considered ontology-based approaches.