Social Book Search Reranking with Generalized Content-Based Filtering

Semantically searching and navigating products (e.g., on Taobao.com or Amazon.com) with professional metadata and user-generated content from social media is a hot topic in information retrieval and recommendation systems, while most existing methods are specifically designed as a purely searching system. In this paper, taking Social Book Search as an example, we propose a general search-recommendation hybrid system for this topic. Firstly, we propose a Generalized Content-Based Filtering (GCF) model. In this model, a preference value, which flexibly ranges from 0 to 1, is defined to describe a user's preference for each item to be recommended, unlike conventionally using a set of preferable items. We also design a weighting formulation for the measure of recommendation. Next, assuming that the query in a searching system acts as a user in a recommendation system, a general reranking model is constructed with GCF to rerank the initial resulting list by utilizing a variety of rich social information. Afterwards, we propose a general search-recommendation hybrid framework for Social Book Search, where learning-to-rank is used to adaptively combine all reranking results. Finally, our proposed system is extensively evaluated on the INEX 2012 and 2013 Social Book Search datasets, and has the best performance (NDCG@10) on both datasets compared to other state-of-the-art systems. Moreover, our system recently won the INEX 2014 Social Book Search Evaluation.