Context-Aware Recommender Systems for Social Networks: Review, Challenges and Opportunities

Journal Article

2021

AREEJ BIN SUHAIM, JAWAD BERRI, 2021

Context-aware recommender systems dedicated to online social networks experienced noticeable
growth in the last few years. This has led to more research being done in this area stimulated by the
omnipresence of smartphones and the latest web technologies. These systems are able to detect specic
user needs and adapt recommendations to actual user context. In this research, we present a comprehensive
review of context-aware recommender systems developed for social networks. For this purpose, we used
a systematic literature review methodology which clearly dened the scope, the objective, the timeframe,
the methods, and the tools to undertake this research. Our focus is to investigate approaches and techniques
used in the development of context-aware recommender systems for social networks and identify the research
gaps, challenges, and opportunities in this eld. In order to have a clear vision of the research potential
in the eld, we considered research articles published between 2015 and 2020 and used a research portal
giving access to major scientic research databases. Primary research articles selected are reviewed and
the recommendation process is analyzed to identify the approach, the techniques, and the context elements
employed in the development of the recommendation systems. The paper presents the detail of the review
study, provides a synthesis of the results, proposes an evaluation based on measurable evaluation tools
developed in this study, and advocates future research and development pathways in this interesting eld.

• Publisher Name: IEEE Access
• Volume Number: 9
• Pages: 57440 - 57463