Search-based recommendation is a paradigm that combines users’ long-term profiles with their current search queries to guide the recommendation process. This dissertation investigates how user-generated text can serve as a valuable source for constructing textual user profiles, with an emphasis on transparency and scrutability, enabling users to understand and control their profiles. It makes three key contributions:
(1) demonstrating the effectiveness of sparse, questionnaire-based profiles for capturing core preferences;
(2) leveraging user-to-user chat data as a novel, richer profiling source; and
(3) developing methods to distill concise profiles from long, noisy review texts using a range of techniques.