Our research group at the University of Michigan has been working on the "related modules" block for Drupal.org for more than 2 years now. We have published 2 papers on this project so far:
1) Assessment of Conversation Co-mentions as a Resource for Software Module Recommendation. Will be presented at ACM Recommender System Conference'09
2) Conversation Pivots and Double Pivots. Presented at ACM Computer Human Interaction Conference'08
This paper is submitted to ACM Recommender System Conference'09, co-authored with my advisor Prof. Paul Resnick.
ABSTRACT
From the last Google Analytics (GA) study on the usefulness of "pivots_block" on 4 recommendation algorithms, we learned that the classical "relevancy" algorithm generated the better results. Therefore, we used the relevancy algorithm on D.O. from Dec/4/2008 to Jan/9/2009. And the average click-thru rate was 0.474%.
Previously we computed the "related projects" by using the frequency of project co-mentions in discussions. For example, if the module Fivestar and CCK were mentioned together in 33 different discussion threads, whereas Fivestar and jRating in 10 threads, then we would think CCK was more relevant to Fivestar than jRating because it has more co-mentions.
However, that algorithm ignores the fact that some very popular modules like CCK simply have more chances to get mentioned, even if it's not that relevant in the context.
The pivots system was enabled on D.O. to all authenticated users on 2008-07-22. This analysis report is based on the data we collected from 2008-07-22 midnight to 2008-07-28 midnight (6 days in total). There were 10454 distinct user IDs from 14701 distinct IP addresses participating during this period.
