Content-based news recommendation systems need to recommend news articles based on the topics and content of articles without using user specific information. Many news articles describe the occurrence of specific events and named entities including people, places or objects. In this paper, we propose a graph traversal algorithm as well as a novel weighting scheme for cold-start content based news recommendation utilizing these named entities. Seeking to create a higher degree of user-specific relevance, our algorithm computes the shortest distance between named entities, across news articles, over a large knowledge graph. Moreover, we have created a new human annotated data set for evaluating content based news recommendation systems. Experimental results show our method is suitable to tackle the hard cold-start problem and it produces stronger Pearson correlation to human similarity scores than other cold-start methods. Our method is also complementary and a combination with the conventional cold-start recommendation methods may yield significant performance gains. The dataset, CNRec, is available at: this https URL
We propose a graph-based semantic model for representing document content. Our method relies on the use of a semantic network, namely the DBpedia knowledge base, for acquiring fine-grained information about entities and their semantic relations, thus resulting in a knowledge-rich document model. We demonstrate the benefits of these semantic representations in two tasks: entity ranking and computing document semantic similarity. To this end, we couple DBpedia's structure with an information-theoretic measure of concept association, based on its explicit semantic relations, and compute semantic similarity using a Graph Edit Distance based measure, which finds the optimal matching between the documents' entities using the Hungarian method. Experimental results show that our general model outperforms baselines built on top of traditional methods, and achieves a performance close to that of highly specialized methods that have been tuned to these specific tasks. Freebase is a practical, scalable tuple database used to structure general human knowledge. The data in Freebase is collaboratively created, structured, and maintained. Freebase currently contains more than 125,000,000 tuples, more than 4000 types, and more than 7000 properties. Public read write access to Freebase is allowed through an HTTP-based graph-query API using the Metaweb Query Language (MQL) as a data query and manipulation language. MQL provides an easy-to-use object-oriented interface to the tuple data in Freebase and is designed to facilitate the creation of collaborative, Web-based data-oriented applications.