A language modeling approach for the recommendation of tourism-related services

In a ubiquitous scenario, people are typically confronted with context evolution and changing influences. This may create new needs and may condition the user perception of what is relevant information. Over the years, different approaches have been proposed to design personalized Recommender Systems (RS), but state-of-the-art approaches mostly assume a fixed representation of a user profile; the dynamicity of the user's interests (and the way of expressing them) while interacting with the environment is not considered. Aim of this work is to predict a user's preferences in the tourism domain, to provide personalized and context-aware recommendations. Therefore, we define a user profile model which expresses in a formal way the user's opinions with respect to a particular entity. In particular, the proposed approach formally models the user generated content (UGC) connected to a group of reviews (written by expert users) for each entity, and compares it with a (positive and negative) statistical language model representing the target user profile associated with that entity. The effectiveness of the approach is illustrated on a real-case scenario.