Designing the content-based recommendation engine

To rewrite our customer requirements in plain English: When a customer browses a particular article, what other articles should we suggest to him?

Let's quickly recap how a content-based recommendation engine works. When a user is browsing a product or item, we need to provide recommendations to the user in the form of other products or items from our catalog. We can use the properties of the items to come up with the recommendations. Let's translate this to our use case.

Items in our case, are news articles.

The properties of a news article are as follows:

• Its content, stored in a text column
• The publisher--who published the article
• The category to which the article belongs

So when a user is browsing a particular news article, we need to give him other news articles as recommendations, based on:

• The text content...