Paper recommendation based on the knowledge gap between a researcher's background knowledge and research target.

The studied problem is quite important and interesting, especially on the scenario of online knowledge management.We construct the concept map, where topics and their relationship are well built.We propose a knowledge gap based paper recommendation method. The massively growing documents make it a challenge for researchers to find high value papers. To solve information explosion, some work on personalized paper recommendation have been proposed. However, the knowledge gap between a researcher's background knowledge and research target is seldom concerned. In this paper, we propose a new method of recommending helpful papers to support researchers by bridging the knowledge gap. First, domain knowledge is extracted as the concept map, which provides a basis of comparing user background knowledge and target knowledge. Then, the knowledge gap is defined with the concept map. To bridge the knowledge gap, the shortest concept paths are searched to explore some suitable knowledge paths, which can help researchers to acquire target knowledge in accordance with their cognition patterns. Finally, experiments are performed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the recommendation method.