Collaborative user modeling with user-generated tags for social recommender systems

With the popularity of social media services, the sheer amount of content is increasing exponentially on the Social Web that leads to attract considerable attention to recommender systems. Recommender systems provide users with recommendations of items suited to their needs. To provide proper recommendations to users, recommender systems require an accurate user model that can reflect a user’s characteristics, preferences and needs. In this study, by leveraging user-generated tags as preference indicators, we propose a new collaborative approach to user modeling that can be exploited to recommender systems. Our approach first discovers relevant and irrelevant topics for users, and then enriches an individual user model with collaboration from other similar users. In order to evaluate the performance of our model, we compare experimental results with a user model based on collaborative filtering approaches and a vector space model. The experimental results have shown the proposed model provides a better representation in user interests and achieves better recommendation results in terms of accuracy and ranking.     

Collaborative user modeling for enhanced content filtering in recommender systems

Recommender systems, which have emerged in response to the problem of information overload, provide users with recommendations of content suited to their needs. To provide proper recommendations to users, personalized recommender systems require accurate user models of characteristics, preferences and needs. In this study, we propose a collaborative approach to user modeling for enhancing personalized recommendations to users. Our approach first discovers useful and meaningful user patterns, and then enriches the personal model with collaboration from other similar users. In order to evaluate the performance of our approach, we compare experimental results with those of a probabilistic learning model, a user model based on collaborative filtering approaches, and a vector space model. We present experimental results that show how our model performs better than existing alternatives.     

Hybrid recommendations for mobile commerce based on mobile phone features

Mobile data communications have evolved as the number of third generation (3G) subscribers has increased. The evolution has triggered an increase in the use of mobile devices, such as mobile phones, to conduct mobile commerce and mobile shopping on the mobile web. There are fewer products to browse on the mobile web; hence, one‐to‐one marketing with product recommendations is important. Typical collaborative filtering (CF) recommendation systems make recommendations to potential customers based on the purchase behaviour of customers with similar preferences. However, this method may suffer from the so‐called sparsity problem, which means there may not be sufficient similar users because the user‐item rating matrix is sparse. In mobile shopping environments, the features of users' mobile phones provide different functionalities for using mobile services; thus, the features may be used to identify users with similar purchase behaviour. In this paper, we propose a mobile phone feature (MPF)‐based hybrid method to resolve the sparsity issue of the typical CF method in mobile environments. We use the features of mobile phones to identify users' characteristics and then cluster users into groups with similar interests. The hybrid method combines the MPF‐based method and a preference‐based method that uses association rule mining to extract recommendation rules from user groups and make recommendations. Our experiment results show that the proposed hybrid method performs better than other recommendation methods.     

Utilizing contextual ontological user profiles for personalized recommendations

As users may have different needs in different situations and contexts, it is increasingly important to consider user context data when filtering information. In the field of web personalization and recommender systems, most of the studies have focused on the process of modelling user profiles and the personalization process in order to provide personalized services to the user, but not on contextualized services. Rather limited attention has been paid to investigate how to discover, model, exploit and integrate context information in personalization systems in a generic way. In this paper, we aim at providing a novel model to build, exploit and integrate context information with a web personalization system. A context-aware personalization system (CAPS) is developed which is able to model and build contextual and personalized ontological user profiles based on the user’s interests and context information. These profiles are then exploited in order to infer and provide contextual recommendations to users. The methods and system developed are evaluated through a user study which shows that considering context information in web personalization systems can provide more effective personalization services and offer better recommendations to users.     

A user-centric evaluation of context-aware recommendations for a mobile news service

Traditional recommender systems provide personal suggestions based on the user’s preferences, without taking into account any additional contextual information, such as time or device type. The added value of contextual information for the recommendation process is highly dependent on the application domain, the type of contextual information, and variations in users’ usage behavior in different contextual situations. This paper investigates whether users utilize a mobile news service in different contextual situations and whether the context has an influence on their consumption behavior. Furthermore, the importance of context for the recommendation process is investigated by comparing the user satisfaction with recommendations based on an explicit static profile, content-based recommendations using the actual user behavior but ignoring the context, and context-aware content-based recommendations incorporating user behavior as well as context. Considering the recommendations based on the static profile as a reference condition, the results indicate a significant improvement for recommendations that are based on the actual user behavior. This improvement is due to the discrepancy between explicitly stated preferences (initial profile) and the actual consumption behavior of the user. The context-aware content-based recommendations did not significantly outperform the content-based recommendations in our user study. Context-aware content-based recommendations may induce a higher user satisfaction after a longer period of service operation, enabling the recommender to overcome the cold-start problem and distinguish user preferences in various contextual situations.     

Customising WAP-based information services on mobile networks

In addition to voice transmission over mobile networks, the demand of data communication has been increasing. To deploy data-oriented applications for mobile terminals, the wireless application protocol (WAP) has provided a promising solution. However, as in the World Wide Web (WWW), the increasing information leads to the problem of information overload. One way to overcome such a problem is to build intelligent recommender systems to provide customised information services. By analyzing the information collected from the user, a customised recommender system is able to reason his personal preferences and to build a model of predictions. In this way, only the information predicted as user-interested can reach the end user. This paper presents a multi-agent framework in which a decision tree-based approach is employed to learn a users preferences. To assess the proposed framework, a mobile phone simulator is used to represent a mobile environment and a series of experiments are conducted. The experimental studies have concentrated on how to recommend appropriate information to the individual user, and on how the system can adapt to a users most recent preferences. The results and analysis show that based on our framework the WAP-based customised information services can be successfully performed.     

Context-aware recommendations through context and activity recognition in a mobile environment

The mobile Internet introduces new opportunities to gain insight in the user’s environment, behavior, and activity. This contextual information can be used as an additional information source to improve traditional recommendation algorithms. This paper describes a framework to detect the current context and activity of the user by analyzing data retrieved from different sensors available on mobile devices. The framework can easily be extended to detect custom activities and is built in a generic way to ensure easy integration with other applications. On top of this framework, a recommender system is built to provide users a personalized content offer, consisting of relevant information such as points-of-interest, train schedules, and touristic info, based on the user’s current context. An evaluation of the recommender system and the underlying context recognition framework shows that power consumption and data traffic is still within an acceptable range. Users who tested the recommender system via the mobile application confirmed the usability and liked to use it. The recommendations are assessed as effective and help them to discover new places and interesting information.     

Personalization and Context-awareness in Social Local Search: State-of-the-art and Future Research Challenges

Location-based services (LBS) are now the platforms for aggregating relevant information about users and understanding their mobile behavior and preferences based on the location histories. The increasing availability of large amounts of spatio-temporal data brings us opportunities and challenges to automatically discover valuable knowledge. While context-aware properties quickly became the key of the success of these pervasive applications, information related to user preferences and social signals still lack of adequate capitalization. Local search in LBSs is a peculiar service where recent and current interests, the network of explicit and implicit social interactions between users can be combined for effectively performing fine-tuned and personalized recommendations of points of interest. In this article we present the various and peculiar aspects of local search in mobile scenarios. Then we explore the added value of personalization and the benefits of considering social signals, summarizing open challenges and emerging technologies.     

一种融合项目特征和移动用户信任关系的推荐算法

协同过滤推荐系统中普遍存在评分数据稀疏问题.传统的协同过滤推荐系统中的余弦、Pearson 等方法都是基于共同评分项目来计算用户间的相似度;而在稀疏的评分数据中,用户间共同评分的项目所占比重较小,不能准确地找到偏好相似的用户,从而影响协同过滤推荐的准确度.为了改变基于共同评分项目的用户相似度计算,使用推土机距离（earth mover's distance,简称EMD）实现跨项目的移动用户相似度计算,提出了一种融合项目特征和移动用户信任关系的协同过滤推荐算法.实验结果表明：与余弦、Pearson 方法相比,融合项目特征的用户相似度计算方法能够缓解评分数据稀疏对协同过滤算法的影响.所提出的推荐算法能够提高移动推荐的准确度.     

A novel mobile recommender system for indoor shopping

With the widespread usage of mobile terminals, the mobile recommender system is proposed to improve recommendation performance, using positioning technologies. However, due to restrictions of existing positioning technologies, mobile recommender systems are still not being applied to indoor shopping, which continues to be the main shopping mode. In this paper, we develop a mobile recommender system for stores under the circumstance of indoor shopping, based on the proposed novel indoor mobile positioning approach by using received signal patterns of mobile phones, which can overcome the disadvantages of existing positioning technologies. Especially, the mobile recommender system can implicitly capture users’ preferences by analyzing users’ positions, without requiring users’ explicit inputting, and take the contextual information into consideration when making recommendations. A comprehensive experimental evaluation shows the new proposed mobile recommender system achieves much better user satisfaction than the benchmark method, without losing obvious recommendation performances.     

MCORE: a context-sensitive recommendation system for the mobile Web

Abstract: Recommendation systems for the mobile Web have focused on endorsing particular types of content to users. Today, mobile service providers have a more direct recommendation channel, namely the short messaging service. Therefore, mobile service providers should consider both the timing and context of recommendation messages (push messages) that are sent to users. Mobile service providers can learn context-specific user preferences by analysing mobile Web use logs and user responses to push messages. In this paper, we present a context-sensitive recommendation system that can be used to select the optimal context in which to send recommendation messages. We call this system the mobile context recommender system (MCORE). We compared user responses to push messages delivered in and out of suitable contexts as determined by MCORE. The precision of push messages delivered within a suitable context was higher than that of messages delivered outside of one.     

一种解决新项目冷启动问题的推荐算法

推荐系统作为缓解信息过载问题的有效方法之一,在社交媒体中的作用日趋重要.但是,新项目冷启动和新用户冷启动问题是推荐技术面临的难题.为了解决新项目冷启动问题,提出了用户时间权重信息概念,该定义考虑到了用户评价时间与项目发布时间的时间间隔,根据用户时间权重值的大小,可以判断该用户是积极用户还是消极用户,以及用户对新项目的偏爱程度;利用三分图的形式来描述用户-项目-标签、用户-项目-属性之间的关系.在充分考虑用户、标签、项目属性、时间等信息基础上,获得个性化的预测评分值公式,提出了推荐算法.实验结果表明:所提出的方法能够实现满足不同用户、不同偏好的个性化推荐,在为用户推荐到合适项目的同时还能带来惊喜.比较实验说明,所提出的方法推荐准确度高,推荐新颖度高.交叉验证实验结果表明:该方法在解决推荐算法中的新项目冷启动问题上,无论是在推荐的准确度还是推荐项目的新颖度上都是有效的.     

Ubiquitous recommender systems

Ubiquitous recommender systems combine characteristics from ubiquitous systems and recommender systems in order to provide personalized recommendations to users in ubiquitous environments. Although not a new research area, ubiquitous recommender systems research has not yet been reviewed and classified in terms of ubiquitous research and recommender systems research, in order to deeply comprehend its nature, characteristics, relevant issues and challenges. It is our belief that ubiquitous recommenders can nowadays take advantage of the progress mobile phone technology has made in identifying items around, as well as utilize the faster wireless connections and the endless capabilities of modern mobile devices in order to provide users with more personalized and context-aware recommendations on location to aid them with their task at hand. This work focuses on ubiquitous recommender systems, while a brief analysis of the two fundamental areas from which they emerged, ubiquitous computing and recommender systems research is also conducted. Related work is provided, followed by a classification schema and a discussion about the correlation of ubiquitous recommenders with classic ubiquitous systems and recommender systems: similarities inevitably exist, however their fundamental differences are crucial. The paper concludes by proposing UbiCARS: a new class of ubiquitous recommender systems that will combine characteristics from ubiquitous systems and context-aware recommender systems in order to utilize multidimensional context modeling techniques not previously met in ubiquitous recommender systems.     

Design and implementation of Blog Rendering and Accessing INstantly system (BRAINS)

A blog (shortened from ‘weblog’) is a trendy way to share personal journal with others in the cyber world. Traditionally rendering and accessing blogs are normally conducted at a stationary PC. However, such a scheme hinders blog users from writing and reading blogs timely. A short-lived idea came out and passed away suddenly. To facilitate the instant blog updating and retrieving, we combined cellular messaging (SMS/MMS messaging and MMS/WAP push) and open-source software (Blosxom and Apache) to develop a novel system for the Blog Rendering and Accessing INstantly (BRAINS). BRAINS enables blog users to note down their whims and share interests anytime and anywhere. Blog journalists can utilize their mobile phones in hand to compose and deliver blogs to BRAINS by SMS and MMS messaging at their pleasure. Through pre-registering on BRAINS, readers also can get the up-to-date blogs content or the incoming blog notification immediately by MMS push or WAP push. With pervasive networks like the GPRS, 3G, public WLAN (PWLAN) and fixed DSL networks, BRAINS makes mobile blog rendering and accessing more evident.     

Digital content recommender on the Internet

On the Web, where information is vast and users are numerous, personalization that aims to offer suitable information to suitable users is essential. To sustain their competitive advantage, portal sites attract many users' attention by supplying personalized content. Most Web content providers offer all users the same content, failing to satisfy individual users' needs. Providers should be able to offer suitable users suitable content with suitable speed. To do so, they must be able to identify customers, predict their interests, determine appropriate content, and deliver it in a personalized format during customers' online sessions. In this paper, the author presents a digital-content recommender system that suggests Web content, in this case news articles, based on a user's preference when he or she visits an Internet news site and reads the published articles. This recommender system creates a one-to-one relationship between the content provider and the user, raises the user's satisfaction, and increases loyalty toward the content provider.     

Enhancing collaborative filtering by user interest expansion via personalized ranking

Recommender systems suggest a few items from many possible choices to the users by understanding their past behaviors. In these systems, the user behaviors are influenced by the hidden interests of the users. Learning to leverage the information about user interests is often critical for making better recommendations. However, existing collaborative-filtering-based recommender systems are usually focused on exploiting the information about the user's interaction with the systems; the information about latent user interests is largely underexplored. To that end, inspired by the topic models, in this paper, we propose a novel collaborative-filtering-based recommender system by user interest expansion via personalized ranking, named iExpand. The goal is to build an item-oriented model-based collaborative-filtering framework. The iExpand method introduces a three-layer, user-interests-item, representation scheme, which leads to more accurate ranking recommendation results with less computation cost and helps the understanding of the interactions among users, items, and user interests. Moreover, iExpand strategically deals with many issues that exist in traditional collaborative-filtering approaches, such as the overspecialization problem and the cold-start problem. Finally, we evaluate iExpand on three benchmark data sets, and experimental results show that iExpand can lead to better ranking performance than state-of-the-art methods with a significant margin.     

基于用户偏好融合的组推荐算法综述

传统的推荐系统是面向单个用户的推荐。作为个性化推荐的一个新的延伸,目前有越来越多的推荐系统正试图面向一组成员进行推荐。将推荐对象从单个用户扩展到一组用户的转变带来了许多新的课题,该文将主要介绍目前已有的几种组推荐算法,并总结一般组推荐系统的偏好融合过程。     

图表示学习短视频智能推荐研究综述

随着短视频数量的爆发式增长, 精准的个性化短视频推荐成为学术界和工业界的迫切需求。然而,现有的推荐方法没有考虑实际的短视频具有数据多源异构多模态、用户行为复杂多样、用户兴趣动态变化等特点。短视频模态间的语义鸿沟、社交网络用户多行为挖掘、用户动态兴趣捕捉依然是短视频推荐领域面临的三个重要问题。针对当前推荐系统存在的问题,并充分考虑短视频推荐系统的实际需求,本文介绍了短视频推荐中基于图表示学习的短视频推荐方法;研究了短视频异构多模态特征表示,充分挖掘视频内容特征并进行高效融合;研究了短视频社交网络用户多行为表示,通过社交网络用户多种行为挖掘更细粒度的用户偏好;研究了用户的动态偏好表示方法,通过利用时序信息建模用户的动态兴趣,保证推荐结果的准确度并增加其多样性与个性化。本研究可在理论和实践上推进基于图特征学习的短视频推荐研究,也可作为短视频推荐系统的关键技术。     

A Movie Recommendation System – An Application of Voting Theory in User Modeling

Our research agenda focuses on building software agents that can employ user modeling techniques to facilitate information access and management tasks. Personal assistant agents embody a clearly beneficial application of intelligent agent technology. A particular kind of assistant agents, recommender systems, can be used to recommend items of interest to users. To be successful, such systems should be able to model and reason with user preferences for items in the application domain. Our primary concern is to develop a reasoning procedure that can meaningfully and systematically tradeoff between user preferences. We have adapted mechanisms from voting theory that have desirable guarantees regarding the recommendations generated from stored preferences. To demonstrate the applicability of our technique, we have developed a movie recommender system that caters to the interests of users. We present issues and initial results based on experimental data of our research that employs voting theory for user modeling, focusing on issues that are especially important in the context of user modeling. We provide multiple query modalities by which the user can pose unconstrained, constrained, or instance-based queries. Our interactive agent learns a user model by gaining feedback aboutits recommended movies from the user. We also provide pro-active information gathering to make user interaction more rewarding. In the paper, we outline the current status of our implementation with particular emphasis on the mechanisms used to provide robust and effective recommendations.     

Personalized recommendation of popular blog articles for mobile applications

Weblogs have emerged as a new communication and publication medium on the Internet for diffusing the latest useful information. Providing value-added mobile services, such as blog articles, is increasingly important to attract mobile users to mobile commerce, in order to benefit from the proliferation and convenience of using mobile devices to receive information any time and anywhere. However, there are a tremendous number of blog articles, and mobile users generally have difficulty in browsing weblogs owing to the limitations of mobile devices. Accordingly, providing mobile users with blog articles that suit their particular interests is an important issue. Very little research, however, has focused on this issue.In this work, we propose a novel Customized Content Service on a mobile device (m-CCS) to filter and push blog articles to mobile users. The m-CCS includes a novel forecasting approach to predict the latest popular blog topics based on the trend of time-sensitive popularity of weblogs. Mobile users may, however, have different interests regarding the latest popular blog topics. Thus, the m-CCS further analyzes the mobile users’ browsing logs to determine their interests, which are then combined with the latest popular blog topics to derive their preferred blog topics and articles. A novel hybrid approach is proposed to recommend blog articles by integrating personalized popularity of topic clusters, item-based collaborative filtering (CF) and attention degree (click times) of blog articles. The experiment result demonstrates that the m-CCS system can effectively recommend mobile users’ desired blog articles with respect to both popularity and personal interests.