A content-based filtering recommends items based on the comparison between the content of the items and a user preference. The user preference is represented with the content which have been seen by the user. Since the performance of recommendation is influenced by the quality of the contents, contents must be represented well.
App recommendation is a task to recommend the most suitable app to a user. It can be performed with the content-based filtering by regarding the content as an app description and the user preference as descriptions of apps used by the user. However, the app description includes not only a functionality content but also a non-functionality content that is not related with the app. When we use the app description as the content, the item and user preference are biased from the non-functionality contents of the app description. As a result, it requires to eliminate the non-functionality contents.
This paper proposes a method to improve the performance of app recommendation. In general, the app description consists of several paragraphs and each paragraph represents the same theme. By removing paragraphs which contain non-functionality content, we can obtain the only functionality content. It can be formulated as a binary classification, that is, given a paragraph in the app description, we classify it as whether non-functionality content or not. Then, we use the only functionality content of app description to represent the app and the user preference.
In experiments, we first check how the proposed method eliminates the non-functionality contents well. It achieves 93.25% accuracy. This result implies that the proposed method is appropriate to remove the non-functionality contents. Second, the performance of app recommendation used only the functionality contents of app description achieves higher performance than the one used both functionality and non-functionality contents. The result proved that when we recommend the app based on the content-based filtering, the non-functionality contents of app description should be eliminated.