Application of Content-Based Approach in Research Paper Recommendation System for a Digital Library

Recommender systems are software applications that provide or suggest items to intended users. These systems use filtering techniques to provide recommendations. The major ones of these techniques are collaborative-based filtering technique, content-based technique, and hybrid algorithm. The motivation came as a result of the need to integrate recommendation feature in digital libraries in order to reduce information overload. Content-based technique is adopted because of its suitability in domains or situations where items are more than the users. TF-IDF (Term Frequency Inverse Document Frequency) and cosine similarity were used to determine how relevant or similar a research paper is to a user's query or profile of interest. Research papers and user's query were represented as vectors of weights using Keyword-based Vector Space model. The weights indicate the degree of association between a research paper and a user's query. This paper also presents an algorithm to provide or suggest recommendations based on users' query. The algorithm employs both TF-IDF weighing scheme and cosine similarity measure. Based on the result or output of the system, integrating recommendation feature in digital libraries will help library users to find most relevant research papers to their needs.