The act of reading has benefits for individuals and societies, yet studies show that reading declines, especially among the young. Recommender systems (RSs) can help stop such decline. There is a lot of research regarding literary books using natural language processing (NLP) methods, but the analysis of textual book content to improve recommendations is relatively rare. We propose content-based recommender systems that extract elements learned from book texts to predict readers’ future interests. One factor that influences reading preferences is writing style; we propose a system that recommends books after learning their authors’ writing style. To our knowledge, this is the first work that transfers the information learned by an author-identification model to a book RS. Another approach that we propose uses over a hundred lexical, syntactic, stylometric, and fiction-based features that might play a role in generating high-quality book recommendations. Previous book RSs include very few stylometric features; hence, our study is the first to include and analyze a wide variety of textual elements for book recommendations. We evaluated both approaches according to a top-k recommendation scenario. They give better accuracy when compared with state-of-the-art content and collaborative filtering methods. We highlight the significant factors that contributed to the accuracy of the recommendations using a forest of randomized regression trees. We also conducted a qualitative analysis by checking if similar books/authors were annotated similarly by experts. Our content-based systems suffer from the new user problem, well-known in the field of RSs, that hinders their ability to make accurate recommendations. Therefore, we propose a Topic Model-Based book recommendation component (TMB) that addresses the issue by using the topics learned from a user’s shared text on social media, to recognize their interests and map them to related books. To our knowledge, there is no literature regarding book RSs that exploits public social networks other than book-cataloging websites. Using topic modeling techniques, extracting user interests can be automatic and dynamic, without the need to search for predefined concepts. Though TMB is designed to complement other systems, we evaluated it against a traditional book CB. We assessed the top k recommendations made by TMB and CB and found that both retrieved a comparable number of books, even though CB relied on users’ rating history, while TMB only required their social profiles.

The Swedish national bank has had shifting policies when it comes to publicity and confidentiality concerning publishing of texts within the bank. For some time, texts written by commissioners within the bank were decided to be published anonymously. Later they revoked the confidentiality policy, publishing all documents publicly again. This led to emerged interests in possible shifting attitudes toward topics discussed by the commissioners when writing anonymously versus publicly. On a request, based on the interests, there are ongoing analyses being conducted with the help of language technology where topics are extracted from the anonymous and public documents respectively. The aim is to find topics related to individual commissioners with the purpose of, as accurately as possible, identifying which of the anonymous documents is written by who. To discover unique relations between the commissioners and the generated topics, this thesis proposes hybrid topic based sentiment analysis as an author identification method to be able to use sentiments of topics as identifying features of commissioners. The results showed promise in the proposed approach. Though, further research is substantial, conducting comparisons with other acknowledged author identification methods, to confirm some level of efficacy, especially on documents containing close similarities among topics.