Personalized Paper Explorer for Your Conference

Organizing a conference? Unlock discovery of your conference's submissions through personalized recommendations, semantic search, and similarity-based exploration - all powered by Recombee, without any backend services.

Originally created for RecSys 2024 and expanded for RecSys 2025 in Prague, this Next.js application demonstrates how to build a modern research-paper discovery experience entirely with Recombee’s API.

Try it out and experiment at no cost using Recombee's free tier with 100 000 requests per month.

See it in action at ACM RecSys 2025

Features

• 🔍 Browse & discover conference papers
  Explore RecSys conference papers with rich metadata and filters.

• 🎯 Personalized recommendations
  Get tailored paper recommendations based on user interactions.

• 🧠 Semantic search
  Search papers using rich embeddings for more relevant results.

• 📌 Bookmarking
  Save interesting papers and revisit them later.

• 🧬 “Similar papers” suggestions
  Quickly jump to related work from any paper detail page.

• ⚙️ Powered entirely by Recombee
  All recommendations and search are powered directly by Recombee’s API - no custom backend required.

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Tech Stack

• Frontend: Next.js, React
• Recommender & Search: Recombee API (including vector search / semantic search)
• Containerization: Docker
• Package manager: pnpm

Prerequisites

Before running the application, you’ll need:

1. Docker (for containerized runs)
2. Recombee account and database
   • Sign up at admin.recombee.com
   • Create a new database in your preferred region
   • Note your:
     • Database ID
     • Private token
     • Region

Environment Setup

1. Clone the repository

git clone https://github.com/recombee/explore-papers-demo.git
cd explore-papers-demo

2. Create an environment file:

cp .env.example .env

3. Fill in your Recombee credentials in the .env file:

RECOMBEE_DB_NAME=your-database-id
RECOMBEE_DB_PRIVATE_TOKEN=your-private-token
RECOMBEE_DB_REGION=your-database-region

Running the Application

Using Docker

1. Build the Docker image:

docker build -t explore-papers-demo .

2. Run the container:

docker run -p 3000:3000 explore-papers-demo

The application will be available at http://localhost:3000

Development Mode

If you prefer to run the application locally for development:

1. Install dependencies:

pnpm i --frozen-lockfile

2. Start the development server:

pnpm dev