Many recommendation systems struggle with the cold-start problem, especially in the early stages of a new application, when there are few active users and limited interactions. Traditional approaches like Collaborative Filtering cannot provide enough recommendations, and text-based methods, while helpful, do not offer sufficient context. This paper argues against the idea that the cold-start phase will eventually disappear and proposes a solution to enhance recommendation performance from the start. We propose using Ontologies and Knowledge Graphs to add a semantic layer to text-based methods and improve the recommendation performance in cold-start scenarios. Our approach uses ontologies to generate a knowledge graph that captures item text attributes’ implicit and explicit characteristics, extending the item profile with similar semantic keywords. We evaluate our method against state-of-the-art text feature extraction techniques and present the results of our experiments.
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