Title: Lightweight tourism recommendation

Authors: Nuno Luz; Ricardo Anacleto; Constantino Martins; Ana Almeida; Joel Pinho Lucas

Addresses: GECAD – Knowledge Engineering and Decision Support Group, R. Dr. António Bernardino de Almeida, 431, 4200-072 Porto, Portugal ' GECAD – Knowledge Engineering and Decision Support Group, R. Dr. António Bernardino de Almeida, 431, 4200-072 Porto, Portugal ' GECAD – Knowledge Engineering and Decision Support Group, R. Dr. António Bernardino de Almeida, 431, 4200-072 Porto, Portugal ' GECAD – Knowledge Engineering and Decision Support Group, R. Dr. António Bernardino de Almeida, 431, 4200-072 Porto, Portugal ' Universidad de Salamanca, Departamento de Informática y Automática, Plaza de la Merced s/n 37008, Salamanca, Spain

Abstract: In this paper, we present the tours planning system entitled TOURSPLAN, along with a new lightweight user modelling (UM) process intended to work as a tourism recommendation system in a commercial environment. The new process tackles issues like cold start, grey sheep and over-specialisation through a rich user model and the application of a gradual forgetting function to the collected user action history. Also, significant performance improvements were achieved regarding the previously proposed UM process.

Keywords: lightweight user modelling; tourism; recommendation system; recommender systems; knowledge acquisition; knowledge adaptation; tour planning; cold start; grey sheep; over-specialisation.

DOI: 10.1504/IJWET.2013.055712

International Journal of Web Engineering and Technology, 2013 Vol.8 No.2, pp.106 - 123

Published online: 31 Mar 2014 *

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