Supplementary Book Suggestion for Computer Science Courses

On-line selling website is currently famous and popular. There are several websites selling products and/or services including on-line book-selling websites. At present, the current book-selling websites usually apply recommender systems to recommend a book or a set of books to customers. However, the recommender systems mostly focus on recommending books that users usually view or buy together and also on books having high review rates. This may cause failure to recommend books that cover most required contents, for example, books related to a course description of a course students have registered. To address on this issue, we here introduce an alternative recommender system called Supplementary Books Suggestion system (SBS system) to create a list of supplementary books related/relevance to a course description of a course in computer science domain by regarding relevance between a book and a course description. This can help students easily find supplementary books to read and also may help to encourage the students doing self-learning. Experiments on real course descriptions were conducted to investigate the effectiveness of the SBS system in the terms of precision, recall, F-measure and average (also total) coverage/uncoverage of contents between a list of supplementary books and a course description.