A framework for diversifying recommendation lists by user interest expansion

Recommender systems have been widely used to discover users’ preferences and recommend interesting items to users during this age of information overload. Researchers in the field of recommender systems have realized that the quality of a top-N recommendation list involves not only relevance but also diversity. Most traditional recommendation algorithms are difficult to generate a diverse item list that can cover most of his/her interests for each user, since they mainly focus on predicting accurate items similar to the dominant interests of users. Additionally, they seldom exploit semantic information such as item tags and users’ interest labels to improve recommendation diversity. In this paper, we propose a novel recommendation framework which mainly adopts an expansion strategy of user interests based on social tagging information. The framework enhances the diversity of users’ preferences by expanding the sizes and categories of the original user-item interaction records, and then adopts traditional recommendation models to generate recommendation lists. Empirical evaluations on three real-world data sets show that our method can effectively improve the accuracy and diversity of item recommendation.