Hybrid Recommender for Research Papers and Articles

In digital libraries and other e-commerce sites, recommender system is the solution that supports the users in information search and decision making. Some of these recommender systems will make predictions by matching the content of an item against the user profile otherwise known as Content-Based recommendation approach. Other recommenders will provide recommendation based on ratings of items from current user and other users and then use it to recommend similar items the current user has not seen, this is known as Collaborative-Based recommender approach. There exist several other approaches that are used in recommending articles and other items to users of different search engines. Over the years several researchers have tried combining these approaches in an attempt to design more efficient recommendations in search engines. This research proposed and designed a prototype of a Hybrid recommender called Zira, which is a model that combines both the Collaborative filtering, Content-based filtering, attribute-based approach to look at contextual information as well as an item-based approach that will solve the issues associated with cold-start problems all working concurrently to complement one another. The proposed system supports multi-criteria ratings, provide more flexible and less intrusive types of recommendations to ensure the improvement in recommendations of e-learning materials to users of digital libraries.