What to read next?: making personalized book recommendations for K-12 users

Abstract

Finding books that children/teenagers are interested in these days is a non-trivial task due to the diversity of topics covered in huge volumes of books with varied readability levels. Even though K-12 readers can turn to book recommenders to look for books, the recommended books may not satisfy their personal needs, since they could be beyond/below their readability levels or fail to match their topics of interest. To address these problems, we introduce BReK12, a book recommender that makes personalized suggestions tailored to each K-12 user U based on books available on a social book-marking site that (i) are similar in content to the ones that are known to be of interest to U, (ii) have been bookmarked by users with reading patterns similar to U's, and (iii) can be comprehended by U. BReK12 is an asset to its users, since it suggests books that are appealing to its users and at grade levels that they can cope with, which can increase their reading selection choices and motivate them to read. We have also developed ReLAT, the readability analysis tool employed by BReK12 to determine the grade level of books. ReLAT is novel, compared with existing readability formulas, since it can predict the grade level of a book even if an excerpt of the book is not available. We have conducted empirical studies which have verified the accuracy of ReLAT in predicting the grade level of a book and the effectiveness of BReK12 over existing baseline recommendation systems.