LinkedVis: exploring social and semantic career recommendations

This paper presents LinkedVis, an interactive visual recommender system that combines social and semantic knowledge to produce career recommendations based on the LinkedIn API. A collaborative (social) approach is employed to identify professionals with similar career paths and produce personalized recommendations of both companies and roles. To unify semantically identical but lexically distinct entities and arrive at better user models, we employ lightweight natural language processing and entity resolution using semantic information from a variety of end-points on the web. Elements from the underlying recommendation algorithm are exposed through an interactive interface that allows users to manipulate different aspects of the algorithm and the data it operates on, allowing users to explore a variety of "what-if" scenarios around their current profile. We evaluate LinkedVis through leave-one-out accuracy and diversity experiments on a data corpus collected from 47 users and their LinkedIn connections, as well as through a supervised study of 27 users exploring their own profile and recommendations interactively. Results show that our approach outperforms a benchmark recommendation algorithm without semantic resolution in terms of accuracy and diversity, and that the ability to tweak recommendations interactively by adjusting profile item and social connection weights further improves predictive accuracy. Questionnaires on the user experience with the explanatory and interactive aspects of the application reveal very high user acceptance and satisfaction.