SPrank: Semantic Path-Based Ranking for Top-N Recommendations Using Linked Open Data

In most real-world scenarios, the ultimate goal of recommender system applications is to suggest a short ranked list of items, namely top-N recommendations, that will appeal to the end user. Often, the problem of computing top-N recommendations is mainly tackled with a two-step approach. The system focuses first on predicting the unknown ratings, which are eventually used to generate a ranked recommendation list. Actually, the top-N recommendation task can be directly seen as a ranking problem where the main goal is not to accurately predict ratings but to directly find the best-ranked list of items to recommend. In this article we present SPrank, a novel hybrid recommendation algorithm able to compute top-N recommendations exploiting freely available knowledge in the Web of Data. In particular, we employ DBpedia, a well-known encyclopedic knowledge base in the Linked Open Data cloud, to extract semantic path-based features and to eventually compute top-N recommendations in a learning-to-rank fashion. Experiments with three datasets related to different domains (books, music, and movies) prove the effectiveness of our approach compared to state-of-the-art recommendation algorithms.