Document recommendation based on the analysis of group trust and user weightings

Abstract

Collaborative filtering (CF) has been applied in various domains to resolve problems related to information overload. In a knowledge-intensive environment, most works are processed through teamwork. A user on a team can reference task-related documents from other trusted members to support work on the task. However, the traditional personalised recommender systems no longer meet the demand of teams or groups. Therefore, this work proposes a novel document recommendation method based on a group-based trust model. Our method will analyse the degrees of trust among users in a group and then identify the trustworthy users. The proposed group trust consists of a hybrid personal trust (HPT) model and users’ importance (i.e. users’ activity, similarity and reputation) in a group. Group-based trust is then integrated with the user-based CF to recommend documents to users. The experiments demonstrate that the proposed method can provide better performance than other trust-based recommendation methods; it not only obtains reliable trust values to increase the accuracy of predictions but also enhances the recommendation quality.