Recommendations Based on User-Generated Comments in Social Media

Abstract

Recommender systems gather user profile data either explicitly (users enter it) or implicitly (online behavior tracking).Surprisingly, given the prevalence of social media forums, which contain a rich set of user comments, there have been very few attempts to analyze the content of these comments to build up a user profile. In this paper, we compare and contrast a number of strategies for using text analysis to automatically gather profile data from user comments on news articles. We use this data to prototype a news recommender system based on the Guardian newspaper's 'Comment is Free' forum. The paper shows the feasibility of the approach: in a user study with fifty participants, our recommender outperforms a commercial 'best-in-class' system. Furthermore, we show that user comments allow recommender systems to track an evolving conversation related to a news article and can thus provide recommendations that better match the topics of conversation in comments, which maybe quite different from those in the original news article.