A model to address the cold-start in peer recommendation by using k-means clustering and sentence embedding

In academia, research collaboration plays a vital role in enhancing the research quality and enriching the academic profile of the authors. Recommending appropriate collaborators from a vast scholarly database, particularly for newcomers, poses a challenging cold-start problem. This study addresses a cold-start problem in peer recommendation, considering a dynamic coauthorship graph as a network structure of academic collaborators. As the coauthorship graph is quite large and complex, an efficient indexing method is essential for speeding up the initial search of similar coauthors. The study introduces an efficient Global Inverted List $\left(GIL\right)$ for indexing research areas and active authors in the coauthorship network. An attribute-based search and filtering mechanism is proposed to identify relevant collaborators, followed by the application of k-means clustering and doc2vec metrics to rank and select top recommendations. A cold user is associated with attributes that identify coauthors with similar research interests. For each attribute of the cold user, the model searches the associated authors from the GIL. Further, two filtering approaches are applied to refine the retrieved author list. The first ensures that the authors have a significant presence in the specified research areas, whereas the second one helps avoid recommending authors with only superficial connections to the cold user. The model creates a feature matrix of filtered authors using the publication features of authors. The k-means clustering applied to the feature matrix generates $k$ clusters, among which the model chooses only those with seed nodes i.e. the clusters which are having seed nodes are selected for further process. Selected clusters are ranked using doc2vec metrics, with the top-ranked cluster providing the final recommendation. The model recommends the top $L$ members of the selected cluster, where $L$ is the length of the recommendations provided to the new user. Our extensive experiments show the efficacy of the proposed model.