Thanks to the support of Google Summer of Code'09, I was able to develop the Recommender Bundle for Drupal, which includes the following modules:
http://drupal.org/project/recommender
http://drupal.org/project/history_rec
http://drupal.org/project/fivestar_rec
http://drupal.org/project/voting_rec
http://drupal.org/project/uc_rec
http://drupal.org/project/similargroups
http://drupal.org/project/media_rec (not developed)
This paper is submitted to ACM Recommender System Conference'09, co-authored with my advisor Prof. Paul Resnick.
ABSTRACT
My Google Summer of Code 2009 proposal was accepted. The basic idea is to develop at least three modules based on Recommender API. For example, one module is to recommend Flash videos based on users' viewing history like in YouTube. A mockup screenshot is like this:
For more details and discussion, please go to http://groups.drupal.org/node/19894.
There's a big demand from the Drupal community to add fivestar-like ratings to the contrib modules. This would be a pretty cool feature, but it has other concerns too.
A brief history to begin with ...
The idea is to generate "related modules" recommendation based on co-citations. Suppose we have TinyMCE and FCKeditor co-mentioned together in many forum discussions, then we consider the 2 modules related to some extend. Here is a detailed explanation.
From the experience of developing the "pivots" Drupal module recommendation system, I developed the general purpose Recommender API module. It was released today.
We developed 4 module recommendation algorithms and tested them on Drupal.org. And we used Google Analytics and tracked the click-through rates. The overall click-through rate was 0.263%, co-occurrences 0.097%, relevance 0.141%, recency 0.114% and uniqueness 0.138%. The relevancy algorithm appeared to have the highest click-through rate, but it was only significantly higher than the co-occurrences algorithm.
You might have noticed that the pivots_block is enabled on drupal.org module pages, such as http://drupal.org/project/i18n. This blog is trying to explain the algorithms we are using in the pivots recommendation system.
We hope to deploy the pivots block to Drupal.org recently. The block displays on a module page its related discussions and related modules. This article explains how the pivots block will be deployed on Druapl.org.
At the heart of the pivots Drupal module recommendation system are the secret recommender algorithms. Currently we are playing with 4 algorithms.
