Traditional approaches to recommender systems have not taken into account situational information when making recommendations, and this seriously limits the relevance of the results. This paper advocates context-awareness as a promising approach to enhance the performance of recommenders, and introduces a mechanism to realize this approach. We present a framework that separates the contextual concerns from the actual recommendation module, so that contexts can be readily shared across applications. More importantly, we devise a learning algorithm to dynamically identify the optimal set of contexts for a specific recommendation task and user. An extensive series of experiments has validated that our system is indeed able to learn both quickly and accurately. Categories and Subject Descriptors H.3.3 [Information Storage and Retrieval]: Information Search and Retrieval—relevance feedback, selection process;