2018 9th International Conference on Information and Communication Systems (ICICS)
Improving Collaborative Filtering Recommender
Systems Using Semantic Information
Bushra Alhijawi*1 , Nadim Obeid+1 2 , Arafat Awajan†1 , Sara Tedmori◦1
1 King
Hussien School of Computer Sciences, Princess Sumaya University for Technology Amman, Jordan
2 King Abdullah II of Information Technology, The University of Jordan Amman, Jordan
Email: bus20179001@std.psut.edu.jo, + N.obeid@psut.edu.jo, † awajan@psut.edu.jo, ◦ S.Tedmori@psut.edu.jo
*
Abstract—The virtual world is overflowing with digital items
which makes user’s experience when searching for, selecting and
buying items harder. The use of a recommender system can help
alleviate this problem and increase the profit of companies by
generating to the user a list of potential favorite items. This
paper proposes a new hybrid algorithm that depends on the
item’s semantic information and the users historical rating data.
The semantic information is used to estimate the strength of
the semantic similarity between users in terms of preferred and
non-preferred items. The historical rating data is used to estimate
the similarity in satisfaction level between users. Based on both
similarity estimates, a unified list of neighbors is produced. This
list will be used in the prediction step.
Recommendation results obtained from employing the pro-
posed hybrid algorithm have been compared against recommen-
dation results from alternative techniques. The results obtained
show that the proposed algorithm outperforms the baseline
techniques in recommendation quality and prediction accuracy.
I. I NTRODUCTION
To help reduce problems associated with information over-
load, the use of Recommender Systems (RSs) has been
common in applications that offer users large amounts of
digital items. A RS that provides users with an accurate list
of recommendations (i.e. potential favorite items or interests
of other pertinent data) will both attract users and incur
benefits to companies [1]–[3]. It has various applications in e-
business (i.e. e-government, e-commerce/e-shopping, e-library,
e-learning, e-tourism, e-resource services, e-group activities)
[3], the DVD rental provider Netflix [4] and the online book
retailer Amazon.com [5]. Moreover, social networks such
as Youtube [6] and Facebook [7], mobile applications and
services [8] and cloud computing services [9] harness the
power of RSs.
A RS is a filtering system that tries to predict the rating
or preferences a user would give to a digital item or to a
social element (e.g. people) that he/she has not yet considered
[10]. Content-based (CB) and Collaborative Filtering (CF)
are the two traditional and widely employed recommendation
techniques. CB filtering techniques generate their prediction
using a model that analyses the description of the item
and the user’s preferences. In CB filtering techniques, the
recommended items are usually similar to items the user
liked in the past. CF methods on the other hand generate
their prediction using a model that analyses large amounts of
information relating to user’s historical rates. In CF methods,
the items recommended to a user are usually similar to what
978-1-5386-4366-2/18/$31.00 ©2018 IEEE
similar users have liked without any understanding of the item
itself. In other words, if user X and user Y gave rates to
n items in a similar way then there is a high probability
that they will give similar rates to other items [11]. CF can
be classified as: memory-based CF or model-based CF [11].
Memory-based CF uses the historical users rating data in order
to calculate similarity values that are used to generate the
recommendation [12]. The model-based CF uses the historical
users rating data to create a model such as Bayesian classifier,
fuzzy algorithm, clustering algorithm and genetic algorithm
in order to generate the recommendation [13]. Demographic-
based and knowledge-based are two additional recommenation
techniques. The former is based on demographic profile of the
user (e.g age and gender) and used to predict different items
for different demographic statuses, while the latter is based
on inferences about a user’s needs and preferences. Finally,
a hybrid recommender system is used to refer to any system
that combines two or more recommendation techniques.
The full dependency on the historical users-item rating
matrix to generate recommendation leads to two problems
that affect the recommendation quality: sparsity and cold-start
problems. The sparsity problem is very common in CF [14],
[15]. This problem can be attributed to the fact that most users
do not rate most of the items or only rate a few. Hence, the
available ratings are sparse. This problem results in user-item
rating matrix that contains a few nonzero entries. Cold start
problem arises when there is not enough information available
to the RS about the Active User (AU) as he/she is a new user or
when a new item is introduced [14], [16], [17]. This problem
makes accurate prediction by the RS harder. A CF requires
large volume of existing user data in order to make accurate
predictions. This large volume of data is at a constant increase
as new ratings are made and as new users and items are added
leading to the renowned scalability problem.
In this research, the authors aim to improve the recom-
mendation’s quality of the CF and overcome the cold-start
and sparsity problems. The proposed technique exploits the
semantic information about the items to handle the cold-start
problem of CF and the historical users-item rating matrix to
alleviate the overspecialization problem of knowledge-based
RS. First, the Semantic Similarity (SemSim) between the AU
and other users in terms of items is calculated in two different
aspects: the preferred and non-preferred items of AU and
other users. Based on the SemSim the most N similar users
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are selected as semantic neighbors. At the same time, the
normalized Pearson Similarity (PerSim) is computed between
AU and other users to compute the similarity in term of
satisfaction degree (i.e. depends on the historical rates). Then,
the users who are satisfied and dissatisfied for quite similar
particular items as the AU are selected to produce another list
of neighbors. Depending on both lists of neighbors, a unified
list of neighbors is produced and then used to generate the
recommendation.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows. Section II
provides an overview of some related worked. Section III
describes the details of recommendation generation process.
Section IV focuses on the testing of the algorithm developed in
this work and shows the comparison results with the traditional
CF techniques. Finally, section V concludes the paper and
presents avenues for future work.
II. R ELATED W ORKS
The semantic information has been utilized in many RS
applications such as e-learning [18]–[22], movie recommen-
dation [23]–[26] and tourism recommendation [27], [28]. This
research focuses on hybrid-RS for movie that combines the
CF with semantic information to improve the results of CF.
Lv et al. [23] developed a recommendation technique that
combines genetic-based RS and domain ontology to overcome
the cold-start problem. Their system generates the recommen-
dation depending on the item’s weighted semantic features.
The weights of the features are obtained using the genetic
algorithm. For testing, the authors used the MovieLens data.
Nilashi et al. [24] presented a new hybrid-RS that combines
CF, ontology and Singular Value Decomposition (SVD). The
domain ontology and SVD are adopted to solve sparsity and
scalability problem, respectively. For testing, the authors used
MovieLens and Yahoo! Webscope R4 datasets. Cheng et al.
[26] developed an ontology-based personalized RS to handle
cold-start, scalability and suggestion-ability static problems.
Depending on the historical rating data and the semantic fea-
tures of the highly rated items, the RS predicts the degree level
the user might like an item. The authors used genetic algorithm
to train a personalized estimating module for each user that is
used later to generate the recommendation. Shambour and Lu
[29] developed a RS that improves the CF accuracy using the
semantic features of the items and user’s social trust network.
Their trust semantic fusion-based recommendation technique
handles both sparsity and cold-start problems. The evaluation
of the proposed RS is done using Yahoo! Webscope R4
and MovieLens. Results obtained demonstrates the method’s
effectiveness in solving the mentioned problems. A hybrid
Multi-Criteria Semantic-enhanced CF RS that combines CF
and semantic filtering technique is proposed in [12]. The
presented system addresses the sparsity and cold-start item
problems. The authors evaluated their technique using Movie-
Lens data. The experimental results of their work show that
the use of semantic information enhances the accuracy of
multi-criteria CF. Alhijawi [30] presented a genetic-based RS
that uses the semantic similarity between the items as one of
the filtering criteria used. The semantic information is used
to handle the cold-start and sparsity problems. The author
evaluated the system using MovieLens and synthetic dataset.
The results show that the use of semantic information enhances
the accuracy of CF by handling the cold-start and sparsity
problems.
In the proposed RS, the genre, actors, director and origin
features of the movie are taken into its account to compute
the SemSim between the AU and other users in term of items.
Two SemSim measures are calculated:
1) The SemSim between the AU and a user u based on the
items that they gave a rate at least 3 (i.e. The SemSim
between the favorite items of AU and the favorite items
of u).
2) The SemSim between the AU and a user u based on the
items that they gave a rate at most 2 (i.e. The SemSim
between the items that AU is disliked it and the items
that u is disliked it).
At the same time, the satisfaction-based similarity (PerSim)
between the AU and other users is computed. Then, both
SemSim and PerSim are used to predict the rates of unrated
movies. Next, the proposed technique will be detailed.
III. R ECOMMENDATION G ENERATOR
In this section, the technique proposed to recommend the
AU desired digital items depending on the SemSim and
PerSim is detailed. First, how to calculate the SemSim and
PerSim are described. After that, the technique of selecting
a unified list of AU’s neighbors is explained. Finally, the
recommendation is generated to the AU depending on the
selected list of neighbors.
For each user and based on the user-item rating matrix, the
items are classified into two groups: preferred items (LikeSet)
and non-preferred items (DisLikeSet). The LikeSet consists
of all items which the user u gave it a rate at least 3.
The DisLikeSet consists of all items which the user u
gave a maximum rate of 2. Then, the SimSem between the
[LikeSetAU and LikeSetu ] and between the [DisLikeSetAU
and DisLikeSetu ] are computed. These values indicate two
varying measures between AU and u as follows:
1) The semantic similarity degree in relation to the items
they preferred. Thus, if AU and u have a high semantic
similarity in term of LikeSet then there is a high
probability that AU will prefer what u preferred and
AU has not yet considered.
2) The semantic similarity degree in relation to the items
they do not prefer. Thus, if AU and u have a high
semantic similarity in term of DisLikeSet then there
is a high probability that AU will not prefer what u has
not preferred and AU has not yet considered. Therefore,
those items should not be recommended to AU in the
future.
Using the semantic information about the items to compute
the similarity will improve the accuracy of CF by decreasing
the effects of cold-start and sparsity problems. But this may
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 2018 9th International Conference on Information and Communication Systems (ICICS)
affect the accuracy because of overspecialization problem. – Compute the SemSim between the AU and u based
Therefore, the RS will not generate recommendations depend- on Eq. 6.
ing only on SemSim but also on PreSim (satisfaction-based). SemSim(AU, u) =
After computing the PerSim between the AU and other users, SemSimLike(AU, u) + SemSimDisLike(AU, u)
a unified list of neighbors is selected. This list will be used 2
to make a more accurate prediction and generate high-quality (6)
recommendations. P
SemSimI(IAU , Iu )
SemSimLike(AU, u) = ,
A. The Semantic-based Similarity |LikeSetAU | ∗ |LikeSetu |
IAU ∈ LikeSetAU and Iu ∈ LikeSetu
The SemSim between the users is dependent on the item- (7)
based SemSim. The item-based SemSim of a given item
against other items is computed based on the common se- SemSimDisLike(AU, u) =
mantic features. Each item is represented by a vector (Vi ) of P
SemSimI(IAU , Iu )
concepts and each concept is represented by a vector (Vc ). , (8)
|DisLikeSetAU | ∗ |DisLikeSetu |
This research takes into account four item features: genre, IAU ∈ DisLikeSetAU and Iu ∈ DisLikeSetu
actor, director and origin. Both genre and actor are multi-
valued attributes whereas origin country is a mono-valued
attribute. To do this, binary Jaccard similarity coefficient is B. The Satisfaction-based Similarity
used to measure the degree of overlap between the two item’s The P reSim is computed based on the items that are rated
features. The SemSim measure calculation steps are mentioned by both AU and u. Therefore, it is reflected the similarity
bellow: based on the satisfaction degree. But considering two users
• Each item i is represented by a vector as follows: are similar is inequitable when one of them rated a small
number of items and another user rated a large number of
Vi = (Vc1 , Vc2 , Vc3 , Vc4 ) (1) items. For instance, consider the case in which user A rated
20 items, user B rated 150 items and both users gave those
20 items same ratings. Then, it is inequitable to say that user
• Classify the items into two groups: preferred items A is 100% similar to user B because user A rated 13.4%
(LikeSet) and non-preferred items (DisLikeSet). of the items that are rated by user B. Therefore, the PerSim
• Compute the SemSim using the Jaccard similarity metric is normalized by the binary Jaccard similarity to get a more
(Eq. 2). accurate and reliable similarity value. The PreSim calculation
steps are detailed bellow:
F11 • Each user u is represented by a binary vector as follows:
SemSimI(p, q) = (2)
F10 + F01 + F11
Vu = (vui1 , vui2 , . . . , vuig ) (9)
Where,
Where,
– Vp = (Vpc1 , Vpc2 , Vpc3 , Vpc4 ).
– k ∈ {1, 2, 3, . . . , g} and g is the total number of
– Vq = (Vqc1 , Vqc2 , Vqc3 , Vqc4 ).
available items.
– F11 : Total number of features which both items, p
– In case vuik = 1, the user rated the item k. Otherwise,
and q, are fall into it. Formally,
vuik = 0.
4
X • Compute the percentage of common items between the
F11 = |Vpcn ∧ Vqcn | (3) AU and u using the binary Jaccard (Eq. 10).
n=1
|UAU ∩ Uu |
Jaccard(AU, u) = (10)
– F10 : Total number of features where p is fall into it |UAU ∪ Uu |
and q is not fall into it. Formally,
• Compute the Pearson correlation between AU and u using
4
X Eq. 11.
F10 = |Vpcn − Vqcn | (4)
n=1 P
− rAU
i∈I (rAU,i ¯ )(ru,i − r¯u )
P earson(AU, u) = qP qP
– F01 : Total number of features where q is fall into it i∈I (rAU,i − rAU
¯ ) 2
i∈I (ru,i − r¯u )
2

and p is no fall into it. Formally, (11)

Where,
4
– I is the group of items that both users AU and u
X
F01 = |Vqcn − Vpcn | (5)
n=1 have rated.
– rAU,i is the rate of user AU on item i.

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 2018 9th International Conference on Information and Communication Systems (ICICS)
– rAU
¯ is the mean rating value of user AU .
– ru,i is the rate of user u on item i.
– r¯u is the mean rating value of user u.
• Compute the normalized similarity between AU and u
(P reSim(AU, u)) using Eq. 12.
P reSim(AU, u) = P earson(AU, u) ∗ Jaccard(AU, u)
(12)
C. Selecting Neighbors
In this step, two lists of neighbors are produced. One list is
a result from SemSim (i.e. SN L) and other is a result from
PreSim (i.e. P N L). P N L contains the most N umN P similar
users to the AU based on satisfaction degree. In other words,
P N L includes the users who are satisfied and dissatisfied
for quite similar particular items as AU. But, these users do
not necessarily have similar semantic behavior to AU . For
instance, user A and user B both gave the rate of 4 to a
particular movie. User A liked the movie because it is an
action and adventure movie while user B enjoyed it since the
actor act1 acted in this movie. SN L contains the most similar
users to the AU semantically. However, the users within this
list may have not the same satisfaction degree as AU for quite
similar particular items. Due to this, those lists are exploited
to produce a more accurate list (i.e. Unified Neighbors List
(UNL)) which contains the users who are similar to the AU
semantically and in satisfaction degree. This list is generated
using the Eq. 13 which depends on both lists: P N L and SN L.
UNL will be used to make a more accurate prediction and
generate a high-quality recommendation. Figure 1 illustrate
the process.
Fig. 1. The process of producing the unified neighbors lists.
U N LV = |P N L ∩ SN L|
D. Producing recommendation
The selected neighbors (i.e. UNL) are used to predict
rates of unrated items by the AU. The prediction rates
calculated using Eq. 15. Then, The T opN items with
highest prediction rates are captured and recommended to
AU.
Sim(AU, u) = P reSim(AU, u) + SemSim(AU, u)
∗ (rui − r̄u )]
P 1 https://grouplens.org/datasets/hetrec-2011/
u∈U [Sim(AU, u)
piAU = r̄AU + P (15)
u∈U Sim(AU, u)
Where,
• U is a set of users who are belong to UNL.
• r̄AU is the mean rating value of user AU .
• r̄u is the mean rating value of user u.
IV. E VALUATION AND R ESULTS
This section provides detailed of how the proposed hybrid
RS was tested. Various experiments were conducted for pur-
poses of comparing the proposed algorithm with alternative
techniques; specifically with cosine similarity and Pearson
correlation. Details related to the data that has been used in
the experiments is provided in subsection IV-A. Subsection
IV-B provides details related to the experiments design and
the measures that were used in the experiments. Finally, the
results are presented and discussed in subsection IV-C.
A. Experimental Data
In the experiments, HetRec 2011 (MovieLens +
IMDb/Rotten Tomatoes) dataset 1 has been used. This
dataset consists of 855598 rating (1-5) collected from 2113
users on 10197 movies, 95321 actors, 4060 directors and
20 genres. It is an extension of the MovieLens10M dataset,
published by GroupLeans research group 2 . Table I shows the
statistics of the experimental data.
B. Experiments Design
Two different experiments were conducted. The first exper-
iment aims to compare the proposed RS with the traditional
CF techniques (i.e. Pearson correlation-based CF and cosine-
based CF). The second experiment aims to justify the multi-
plication operation between Jaccard and Pearson values when
computing the PreSim. In order to perform this experiment,
the PreSim is calculated using two equations; the first equation
is essentially the product Jaccard and Pearson similarity and
the second equation is using only Pearson similarity. Each RS
ran 250 times and the average of the 250 runs was taken to
get more accurate results.
The results of the proposed RS are compared with the
ones obtained from the other approaches using Mean Absolute
Error (MAE) and the recommendation quality metrics: recall,
precision and F1-measure. MAE (Eq. 16) is a quantity used to
measure how close prediction rates are to the real rates. The
(13) prediction accuracy is computed using a different number of
neighbor users for the AU;(K). The value of K range between
20 to 140. Recall (Eq. 17) represents the percentage of the
system sensitivity or the system ability to gather the favorite
items to the AU. While precision (Eq. 18) represents the
the
system ability to suggest items that are truly interesting for the
are
AU. F1-measure (Eq. 19) is the harmonic mean of precision
the
and recall. Those metrics are calculated using different values
the
of N (number of recommendations made) ranging from 10
to 100. All users and items in the data set are considered
as historical data except one user (u) which is considered
(14)
as an AU. In each run, AU is selected randomly. For testing
2 https://grouplens.org/
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 2018 9th International Conference on Information and Communication Systems (ICICS)
TABLE I
DATA S TATISTICS

Ratings/User Ratings/Movie Origin country/Movie Actors/Movie Director/Movie Genres/Movie

404.921 84.637 1 22.778 1 2.040

purposes, 50% of the items which were rated by u hid and make the prediction. On average, the results obtained from
assuming that the proposed RS should recommend to u a set using Method 1 are 13%, 23% and 29.6% better than Method
of items which belong to the hided items set and its ratings 2, 3 and 4, respectively.
are 3, 4 or 5.
U PIu
1 X i=1 |pu,i − ru,i |
M AE = (16)
#U u=1 #Iu

TP
Recall = (17)
TP + FN

TP
P recision = (18)
TP + FP

2 ∗ P recision ∗ Recall
F 1 − measure = (19)
P recision + Recall
C. Results Fig. 3. The comparison between Method 1 and other methods based on the
precision.
In this section, the results obtained from all experiments
are presented and discussed. The objective is to compare the
proposed technique to the alternative techniques in terms of
prediction accuracy and recommendation quality. Note that
Method 1, 2, 3 and 4 are the proposed technique, the proposed
technique without normalizing the Pearson similarity, Pear-
son correlation-based technique and cosine-based technique,
respectively.

Fig. 4. The comparison between Method 1 and other methods based on the
F1-measure.

Figs. 3 and 4 show the precision and F1-measure results,

Fig. 2. The comparison between Method 1 and other methods based on the
accuracy.
Fig. 2 shows the MAE results obtained from all methods.
As may be seen in this figure, the accuracy degree of Method
1 is far better than the results of Method 2, 3 and 4 for any
selected value of the number of neighbors (k). The accuracy
of all methods is improved when the k is increased. But the
MAE results of Method 1 when k > 80 are so close for
any selected value of k. This means that Method 1 is able
to predict the rates accurately without the need for a large
number of neighbors. Note that selecting a larger number of
neighbors increases the computational time that is needed to
respectively. As known, precision and F1-measure reach its
best value at 1 and worst at 0. The precision of all methods
decreases when the number of recommendations increases. As
shown, the precision of Method 1 is close to the recommenda-
tion quality of Method 2. Moreover, the precision of Method
2 is better than that of Method 1 when N = {60, 70, 90}.
However, Method 1 outperforms Method 2, 3 and 4 by 1.6%,
78.2% and 161.7%, respectively. This indicates that Method 1
can offer more reliable and interesting items to users than
other methods. Based on Fig. 4, one can observe that the
recommendation quality of Method 1 is much higher than the
recommendation quality of the other methods. Also, it can be
clearly seen that there is a positive correlation between the
F1-measure and N . This result indicates that the recall results
of Method 1 outperforms the recall of the other methods. This
is due to the fact that F1-measure depends on both recall and

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 2018 9th International Conference on Information and Communication Systems (ICICS)
precision. The F1-measure results of Method 1 are better than
Method 2,3 and 4 by 0.86%, 90.4% and 170.7%, respectively.
The second experiment aims to justify the multiplication op-
eration between Jaccard and Pearson values when computing
the PreSim. As mentioned, in this experiment the PreSim is
calculated using two equations; the first by multiply Jaccard
and Pearson similarity (i.e. Method 1) and the second by only
Pearson similarity (i.e. Method 2). Figs. 16, 3 and 4 clearly
show that the accuracy and recommendation quality of Method
1 is better than those obtained from using Method 2.
V. C ONCLUSION
In this research, a new hybrid RS that improves the rec-
ommendation quality and prediction accuracy of CF is pro-
posed. This RS uses the semantic information about the item
to compute the semantic similarity between the users. This
improved the accuracy of CF by decreasing the effects of cold-
start problem. But, depending solely on the semantic similarity
may affect the accuracy because of overspecialization problem.
Therefore, the recommendation does not generate recommen-
dations depending only on semantic similarity but also on
satisfaction-based similarity. In order to compute the semantic
similarity, the rated items by each user are classified into two
groups preferred items and non-preferred items. The semantic
similarity between the preferred items of AU and other users
is computed to find the semantic similarity degree in term
of what they preferred. The semantic similarity between the
non-preferred items of AU and other users is computed to
find the semantic similarity degree in terms of what they do
not preferred. The satisfaction-based similarity is computed
using the Pearson correlation and depending on the historical
rating data. Next, a unified list of neighbors is produced based
on both semantic and satisfaction-based similarity. This list
includes the users who have similar semantic behavior and
satisfaction degree to the AU .
The proposed RS is compared to the baseline techniques
in terms of prediction accuracy and recommendation quality.
The results obtained prove that the proposed algorithm has
better performance in terms of accuracy and quality compared
to the alternative technique. Also, the results show that the
proposed technique is capable of making high-quality recom-
mendation regardless of the number of selected neighbors and
recommendations.
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