SEMPRE

The amount of digital information is constantly increasing, and search engines are still the means for accessing this information. However, recommender systems are at their best way to become a remedy to this unsatisfying situation. Especially in m- and e-commerce recommender systems have already achieved a high level of attention and application. Unfortunately current recommender technology suffers from two major shortcomings. They require a huge amount of expertise and handcrafting for modelling an application domain, and they rely in their recommendations on the behaviour and opinions of those users active in the system. This is a poor resource compared to the abundance of opinions and ratings out there in the internet.

With the project SEMPRE, we aim at developing semantic technology for exploiting the rich and dynamic resource of factual information and human opinions available on the internet. This will be achieved through an iterative, adaptive semantics-driven process where existing profiles and domain ontologies are used as seed knowledge to access further information on the web, and where data extracted from the web are employed to extend and refine the domain ontologies and profiles applied in recommendation. Moreover, systems that incorporate user ratings into their recommendation are subject to shilling. Therefore in SEMPRE we are also concerned with the development and implementation of mechanisms for the assessment of trust in recommender system.

To achieve our goal we bring together research from (i) recommender technology, (ii) web-based document, text and opinion mining including amongst others methods and techniques from information retrieval, information extraction and question-answering, and (iii) semantic technologies such as those employed in ontology creation, ontology adaptation and the exploitation of ontologies for information mining from web documents. From a technological point of view SEMPRE aims at providing a generic solution. Rather than being a monolithic system, SEMPRE will be devised as a platform for the semantic integration of (small) specialised services, plug-in tools leading to different results under different contexts and conditions.

---

Website

SEMPRE Homepage

---