TNO and RUN at the TREC 2012 Contextual Suggestion Track: Recommending Personalized Touristic Sights Using Google Places

The purpose of the Contextual Suggestion track is to suggest personalized touristic activities to an individual, given a certain location and time. In our approach, we collected initial recommendations by using the location context as search query in Google Places. We first ranked the recommendations based on their textual similarity to the user profiles. In order to improve the ranking of popular sights, we combined the resulted ranking with a number of other rankings based on Google Search, popularity and categories. Finally, we performed filtering based on the temporal context.