📚 Book Recommendation System Using OpenAI Embeddings And  Nomic Atlas Visualization

We’ll build a semantic book recommendation system powered by OpenAI text embeddings, and visualize the results using Nomic Atlas — a powerful tool for interactive visualization of high-dimensional data.

We'll walk through:

• Preparing the dataset (📁 from Kaggle)

• Generating embeddings with OpenAI API

• Performing semantic search using cosine similarity

• Visualizing book relationships using Nomic Atlas

📥 Step 1: Download the Dataset

We’ll use the Goodreads Books dataset available on Kaggle:
👉 Download from Kaggle

Once downloaded, load it into a pandas DataFrame:

import pandas as pd

df_final = pd.read_csv('./goodreads_data.csv')
df_final.dropna(inplace=True)

🧠 Step 2: Estimate Embedding Token Cost

Before generating embeddings, it’s good to estimate token usage and cost:

import tiktoken

enc = tiktoken.encoding_for_model('text-embedding-ada-002')
description = list(df_final['Description'])

total_tokens = sum([len(enc.encode(item)) for item in description])
print(f'Total tokens : {total_tokens}')

cost = total_tokens * (0.0004 / 1000)
print(f'Estimated cost in dollar : {cost:.10f}')

• This uses OpenAI's text-embedding-ada-002 which costs $0.0004 per 1K tokens.

🤖 Step 3: Generate Embeddings Using OpenAI

Set up OpenAI's new SDK interface:

import openai

client = openai.OpenAI(api_key="your-openai-api-key")

def get_embedding(text, model="text-embedding-ada-002"):
    text = str(text).replace("\n", " ")
    response = client.embeddings.create(input=[text], model=model)
    return response.data[0].embedding

Apply it to your DataFrame and save the results:

def get_embeddings_and_save_to_csv(embedding_cache_file):
    df_final['embedding'] = df_final['Description'].apply(lambda x: get_embedding(x))
    df_final.to_csv(embedding_cache_file, index=False)

embedding_cache_file = 'book_embedding.csv'
get_embeddings_and_save_to_csv(embedding_cache_file)

🔁 Step 4: Load Embeddings for Recommendation

df_embeddings = pd.read_csv('book_embedding.csv')

# Convert from string to actual vector
import numpy as np
df_embeddings['embedding'] = df_embeddings['embedding'].apply(eval).apply(np.array)

🎯 Step 5: Recommend Books Using Cosine Similarity

Define cosine similarity and a recommendation function:

def cosine_similarity(vec1, vec2):
    vec1 = np.array(vec1).flatten()
    vec2 = np.array(vec2).flatten()
    dot = np.dot(vec1, vec2)
    norm1 = np.linalg.norm(vec1)
    norm2 = np.linalg.norm(vec2)
    return dot / (norm1 * norm2) if norm1 and norm2 else 0.0

def get_recommendation_from_title(df_embeddings, title, k=5):
    if title not in df_embeddings['Book'].values:
        print(f"Book '{title}' not found.")
        return []

    book_embedding = df_embeddings[df_embeddings['Book'] == title]['embedding'].iloc[0]

    df_embeddings['similarity'] = df_embeddings['embedding'].apply(
        lambda emb: cosine_similarity(book_embedding, emb)
    )

    recommendations = df_embeddings[df_embeddings['Book'] != title] \
        .sort_values(by='similarity', ascending=False) \
        .head(k)

    return recommendations[['Book', 'similarity']]

🔍 Example:

get_recommendation_from_title(df_embeddings, 'War and Peace', 5)

🌍 Step 6: Visualize Embeddings with Nomic Atlas

Install Nomic:

pip install nomic

Prepare the data and embeddings for visualization:

from nomic import atlas

df_visualize = pd.read_csv('book_embedding.csv')
df_visualize['embedding'] = df_visualize['embedding'].apply(eval).apply(np.array)

data = df_visualize[['Book', 'Author', 'Genres']].to_dict(orient='records')
embeddings = np.array(df_visualize['embedding'].tolist())

Now send it to Atlas:

project = atlas.map_data(
    data=data,
    embeddings=embeddings
)

project.name = "Books"
project.save()

After a few moments, Atlas will give you a link to explore your interactive book map — similar books will cluster together!

📌 What You’ve Built

✔ A semantic book search that understands meaning, not just keywords
✔ Recommender system using OpenAI embeddings
✔ Interactive map of books using Nomic Atlas
✔ End-to-end pipeline from dataset → embeddings → visualization

💡 Final Thoughts

Semantic search opens up new ways to explore data. With just a few tools:

• OpenAI for embeddings

• NumPy for math

• Pandas for data handling

• Nomic Atlas for beautiful visualization

…you can build real-world AI systems in just a few lines of code.

🔗 Resources

• OpenAI Embeddings Docs

• Nomic Atlas

• Goodreads Dataset on Kaggle