An LDA-based approach to scientific paper recommendation

Recommendation of scientific papers is a task aimed to support researchers in accessing relevant articles from a large pool of unseen articles. When writing a paper, a researcher focuses on the topics related to her/his scientific domain, by using a technical language. The core idea of this paper is to exploit the topics related to the researchers scientific production (authored articles) to formally define her/his profile; in particular we propose to employ topic modeling to formally represent the user profile, and language modeling to formally represent each unseen paper. The recommendation technique we propose relies on the assessment of the closeness of the language used in the researchers papers and the one employed in the unseen papers. The proposed approach exploits a reliable knowledge source for building the user profile, and it alleviates the cold-start problem, typical of collaborative filtering techniques. We also present a preliminary evaluation of our approach on the DBLP.