Relevance Feedback Models for Recommendation

We extended language modeling approaches in information retrieval (IR) to combine collaborative filtering (CF) and content-based filtering (CBF). Our approach is based on the analogy between IR and CF, especially between CF and relevance feedback (RF). Both CF and RF exploit users’ preference/relevance judgments to recommend items. We first introduce a multinomial model that combines CF and CBF in a language modeling framework. We then generalize the model to another multinomial model that approximates the Polya distribution. This generalized model outperforms the multinomial model by 3.4% for CBF and 17.4% for CF in recommending English Wikipedia articles. The performance of the generalized model for three different datasets was comparable to that of a state-of-theart item-based CF method.