Extração de características de perfil e de contexto em redes sociais para recomendação de recursos educacionais

Abstract

There are several educational resources distributed in different repositories that address to a wide range of subjects and have different educational goals. The proper choice of these educational resources is a challenge for users who want to use them for their intellectual development. In this context, recommendation systems may help users in this task.In order to be able to generate personalized recommendations, it is important to identify information that will help to define user profile and assist in identifying his/her needs and interests. The constant and ever-increasing use of some technological tools allows the identification of different information about profile, interests, preferences, interaction style and user behavior from the spontaneous interaction that occurs in these systems, as, for example, the social networks. This paper presents the proposal and the development of one architecture able to extract users´ profile characteristics and educational context, from the Facebook social network and recommend educational resources in individualized and personalized manner, consistent with these characteristics. The proposed solution is supported by Information Extraction Techniques and ontologies for the extraction, enrichment and definition of user characteristics and interests. The Information Extraction techniques were applied to texts associated with “LIKE” and shared user´s pages on his social networks to extract structured information that can be used in the recommendation process of educational resources, the ontologies were used to search to interests related to extracted subjects. The recommendation process is based on learning objects repositories and linked data repositories and is carried out within social networks, taking advantage of user time spent at the web. The proposal evaluation was made from the development of a prototype, three proofs of concept and a case study. The evaluation results show the viability and relevant users´ acceptance in order to extract information about their educational interests, automatically generated from the Facebook social network, enrich these information, find implicit interests and use this information to recommend educational resources. It was also validated the possibility of people recommendation, enabling the establishment of interest network, based on a specific subject, showing good partners to study and research.