A non-intrusive movie recommendation system

Abstract

Several recommendation systems have been developed to support the user in choosing an interesting movie from multimedia repositories. The widely utilized collaborative-filtering systems focus on the analysis of user profiles or user ratings of the items. However, these systems decrease their performance at the start-up phase and due to privacy issues, when a user hides most of his personal data. On the other hand, content-based recommendation systems compare movie features to suggest similar multimedia contents; these systems are based on less invasive observations, however they find some difficulties to supply tailored suggestions. In this paper, we propose a plot-based recommendation system, which is based upon an evaluation of similarity among the plot of a video that was watched by the user and a large amount of plots that is stored in a movie database. Since it is independent from the number of user ratings, it is able to propose famous and beloved movies as well as old or unheard movies/programs that are still strongly related to the content of the video the user has watched. We experimented different methodologies to compare natural language descriptions of movies (plots) and evaluated the Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) to be the superior one in supporting the selection of similar plots. In order to increase the efficiency of LSA, different models have been experimented and in the end, a recommendation system that is able to compare about two hundred thousands movie plots in less than a minute has been developed. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.