Intelligent Techniques in Recommender Systems and Contextual Advertising: Novel Approaches and Case Studies

Information Filtering deals with the problem of selecting relevant information for a given user, according to her/his preferences and interests. In this chapter, the authors consider two ways of performing information filtering: recommendation and contextual advertising. In particular, they study and analyze them according to a unified view. In fact, the task of suggesting an advertisement to a Web page can be viewed as the task of recommending an item (the advertisement) to a user (the Web page), and vice versa. Starting from this insight, the authors propose a content-based recommender system based on a generic solution for contextual advertising and a hybrid contextual advertising system based on a generic hybrid recommender system. Relevant case studies have been considered (i.e., a photo recommender and a Web advertiser) with the goal of highlighting how the proposed approach works in practice. In both cases, results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed solutions.