Structured collaborative filtering

In a general collaborative filtering (CF) setting, a user profile contains a set of previously rated items and is used to represent the user's interest. Unfortunately, most CF approaches ignore the underlying structure of user profiles. In this paper, we argue that a certain class of interest is best represented jointly by several items, drawing an analogy to "phrases" in text retrieval, which are not equivalent to the separate meaning of their words. At an alternative stance, we also consider the situation where, analogously to word synonyms, two items might be substitutable when representing a class of interest. We propose an approach integrating these two notions as opposing poles on a continuum spectrum. Upon this, we model the underlying structure in user profiles, drawing an analogy with text retrieval. The approach gives rise to a novel structured Vector Space Model for CF. We show that item-based CF approaches are a special case of the proposed method.