Building a personalized tourist attraction recommender system using crowdsourcing

We demonstrate how crowdsourcing can be used to automatically build a personalized tourist attraction recommender system, which tailors recommendations to specific individuals, so different people who use the system each get their own list of recommendations, appropriate to their own traits. Recommender systems crucially depend on the availability of reliable and large scale data that allows predicting how a new individual is likely to rate items from the catalog of possible items to recommend. We show how to automate the process of generating this data using crowdsourcing, so that such a system can be built even when such a dataset is not initially available. We first find possible tourist attractions to recommend by scraping such information from Wikipedia. Next, we use crowdsourced workers to filter the data, then provide their opinions regarding these items. Finally, we use machine learning methods to predict how new individuals are likely to rate each attraction, and recommend the items with the highest predicted ratings.