User based recommender

Dear Mahout Team,

I am a student new to machine learning and i am trying to build a user
based recommender using mahout.

My dataset is a csv file as an input but it has many fields as text and i
understand mahout needs numeric values.

Can you give me a headstart as to where i should start and what kind of
tools i need to parse the text colummns,

Also an idea on which classifiers or clustering methods i should use would
be highly appreciated.

Best Regards;
Yash Patel