Abstract

Prior research on text collections of religious documents has demonstrated that viable recommender systems in the area are lacking, if not non-existent, for some datasets. For example, both www.LDS.org and scriptures.byu.edu are websites designed for religious use. Although they provide users with the ability to search for documents based on keywords, they do not provide the ability to discover documents based on similarity. Consequently, these systems would greatly benefit from a recommender system. This work provides a framework for evaluating recommender systems and is flexible enough for use with either website. Such a framework would identify the best recommender system that provides users another way to explore and discover documents related to their current interests, given a starting document. The framework created for this thesis, RelRec, is attractive because it compares two different recommender systems. Documents are considered relevant if they are among the nearest neighbors, where "nearest" is defined by a particular system's similarity formula. We use RelRec to compare output of two particular recommender systems on our selected data collection. RelRec shows that LDA recommeder outperforms the TF-IDF recommender in terms of coverage, making it preferable for LDS-based document collections.

Degree

College and Department

Humanities; Linguistics and English Language

Rights

http://lib.byu.edu/about/copyright/