Context-Aware Recommender Systems for Social Networks: Review, Challenges and Opportunities

Context-aware recommender systems dedicated to online social networks experienced noticeable growth in the last few years. This has led to more research being done in this area stimulated by the omnipresence of smartphones and the latest web technologies. These systems are able to detect specific user needs and adapt recommendations to actual user context. In this research, we present a comprehensive review of context-aware recommender systems developed for social networks. For this purpose, we used a systematic literature review methodology which clearly defined the scope, the objective, the timeframe, the methods, and the tools to undertake this research. Our focus is to investigate approaches and techniques used in the development of context-aware recommender systems for social networks and identify the research gaps, challenges, and opportunities in this field. In order to have a clear vision of the research potential in the field, we considered research articles published between 2015 and 2020 and used a research portal giving access to major scientific research databases. Primary research articles selected are reviewed and the recommendation process is analyzed to identify the approach, the techniques, and the context elements employed in the development of the recommendation systems. The paper presents the detail of the review study, provides a synthesis of the results, proposes an evaluation based on measurable evaluation tools developed in this study, and advocates future research and development pathways in this interesting field.