A system and method are described herein for improving content-based (CB) filtering to find other items similar to a particular item. For example, the system and method can operate to (1) collect ground truth from users, experts or non-experts for a subset of items in a library; (2) build similarity model(s) against the collected ground truth and evaluate this/these similarity model(s) for generalizability to all items in the library, and (3) build recommendations for users based on knowledge elicited from the users themselves, combined with the similarity scores in the built similarity model(s).