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.     

Non-dominated differential context modeling for context-aware recommendations

Context plays an important role in the process of decision making. A user’s preferences on the items may vary from contexts to contexts, e.g., a user may prefer to watch a different type of the movies, if he or she is going to enjoy the movie with partner rather than with children. Context-aware recommender systems, therefore, were developed to adapt the recommendations to different contextual situations, such as time, location, companion, etc. Differential context modeling is a series of recommendation models which incorporate contextual hybrid filtering into the neighborhood based collaborative filtering approaches. In this paper, we propose to enhance differential context modeling by utilizing a non-dominated user neighborhood. The notion of dominance relation was originally proposed in multi-objective optimization, and it was reused to definite non-dominated user neighborhood in collaborative filtering recently. These non-dominated user neighbors refer to the neighbors that dominate others from different perspectives of the user similarities, such as the user-user similarities based on ratings, demographic information, social relationships, and so forth. In this paper, we propose to identify the non-dominated user neighborhood by exploiting user-user similarities over multiple contextual preferences. Our experimental results can demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approaches in comparison with popular context-aware collaborative filtering models over five real-world contextual rating data sets.

     

Personalized Tag Recommendation Using Social Influence

Tag recommendation encourages users to add more tags in bridging the semantic gap between human concept and the features of media object,which provides a feasible solution for content-based multimedia information retrieval.In this paper,we study personalized tag recommendation in a popular online photo sharing site - Flickr.Social relationship information of users is collected to generate an online social network.From the perspective of network topology,we propose node topological potential to characterize user’s social influence.With this metric,we distinguish different social relations between users and find out those who really have influence on the target users.Tag recommendations are based on tagging history and the latent personalized preference learned from those who have most influence in user’s social network.We evaluate our method on large scale real-world data.The experimental results demonstrate that our method can outperform the non-personalized global co-occurrence method and other two state-of-the-art personalized approaches using social networks.We also analyze the further usage of our approach for the cold-start problem of tag recommendation.     

一种三部图网络中标签时间加权的推荐方法

社会标签可以提供对象高度抽象的内容信息和个性偏好信息,因此标签的使用有助于提高个性推荐的精度.用户的偏好会随时间的变化而变化,网络中的资源也会随着时间推移而增加.如何根据用户兴趣的变化推荐出用户即时感兴趣的网络资源,已成为推荐系统研究的新问题.在用户-标签-对象三部分图网络结构中,结合标签使用频率和用户添加标签的时间,提出了一种利用标签时间加权的资源推荐算法.实验结果表明,利用标签时间加权的算法能有效地提高推荐的精度和多样性.     

Incorporating contextual information and collaborative filtering methods for multimedia recommendation in a mobile environment

Recommender systems have been developed in different application services. In addition to using recommendation techniques, it is helpful to employ contextual information in determining the relevance of an item to a users’s needs. To enhance recommendation performance, we present in this study two approaches that, in a direct way, integrate different types of contextual information and user ratings in computational methods. To verify the proposed approaches in making collaborative recommendations, we conduct a series of experiments to evaluate performance. The results show that the proposed context-aware methods outperform other conventional approaches. Moreover, we implement a mobile multimedia recommendation system on a cloud platform to demonstrate how our approaches can be used to develop a real-world application.     

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.     

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.     

Combining user preferences and user opinions for accurate recommendation

Recommendation systems represent a popular research area with a variety of applications. Such systems provide personalized services to the user and help address the problem of information overload. Traditional recommendation methods such as collaborative filtering suffer from low accuracy because of data sparseness though. We propose a novel recommendation algorithm based on analysis of an online review. The algorithm incorporates two new methods for opinion mining and recommendation. As opposed to traditional methods, which are usually based on the similarity of ratings to infer user preferences, the proposed recommendation method analyzes the difference between the ratings and opinions of the user to identify the user’s preferences. This method considers explicit ratings and implicit opinions, an action that can address the problem of data sparseness. We propose a new feature and opinion extraction method based on the characteristics of online reviews to extract effectively the opinion of the user from a customer review written in Chinese. Based on these methods, we also conduct an empirical study of online restaurant customer reviews to create a restaurant recommendation system and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods.     

A novel framework to alleviate the sparsity problem in context-aware recommender systems

Recommender systems have become indispensable for services in the era of big data. To improve accuracy and satisfaction, context-aware recommender systems (CARSs) attempt to incorporate contextual information into recommendations. Typically, valid and influential contexts are determined in advance by domain experts or feature selection approaches. Most studies have focused on utilizing the unitary context due to the differences between various contexts. Meanwhile, multi-dimensional contexts will aggravate the sparsity problem, which means that the user preference matrix would become extremely sparse. Consequently, there are not enough or even no preferences in most multi-dimensional conditions. In this paper, we propose a novel framework to alleviate the sparsity issue for CARSs, especially when multi-dimensional contextual variables are adopted. Motivated by the intuition that the overall preferences tend to show similarities among specific groups of users and conditions, we first explore to construct one contextual profile for each contextual condition. In order to further identify those user and context subgroups automatically and simultaneously, we apply a co-clustering algorithm. Furthermore, we expand user preferences in a given contextual condition with the identified user and context clusters. Finally, we perform recommendations based on expanded preferences. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework.     

基于网络和标签的混合推荐算法

基于网络结构的推荐算法利用用户与项目间的结构关系进行推荐,忽略了用户偏好,而项目的标签隐含了项目的内容及用户的偏好,提出一种基于网络结构和标签的混合推荐方法。算法根据用户选择项目的标签统计信息,分别采用TF-IDF和用户对标签的支持度两种方法构建用户偏好模型,与基于网络的推荐模型进行线性组合推荐。通过在基准数据集MovieLens上测试证明,该算法在推荐结果命中率、个性化程度、多样性等方面均优于基于网络的推荐算法。     

一种基于用户情境聚类的个性化推荐算法

面向基于情境感知的推荐问题,提出一种基于用户情境聚类的个性化推荐算法。该算法利用情境预过滤的思想,首先运用模糊聚类的方法对历史数据集中用户的情境进行聚类,构造与当前用户情境相似度较高的用户集合,再与传统的基于用户的协同过滤算法相结合进行个性化推荐。实验采用公开数据集,结果表明该算法在多维情境信息条件下可用,并且推荐准确度要高于传统协同过滤算法,在聚类粒度不同的情况下对推荐结果也会产生不同的影响。     

Joint user knowledge and matrix factorization for recommender systems

Currently, most of the existing recommendation methods treat social network users equally, which assume that the effect of recommendation on a user is decided by the user’s own preferences and social influence. However, a user’s own knowledge in a field has not been considered. In other words, to what extent does a user accept recommendations in social networks need to consider the user’s own knowledge or expertise in the field. In this paper, we propose a novel matrix factorization recommendation algorithm based on integrating social network information such as trust relationships, rating information of users and users’ own knowledge. Specifically, since we cannot directly measure a user’s knowledge in the field, we first use a user’s status in a social network to indicate a user’s knowledge in a field, and users’ status is inferred from the distributions of users’ ratings and followers across fields or the structure of domain-specific social network. Then, we model the final rating of decision-making as a linear combination of the user’s own preferences, social influence and user’s own knowledge. Experimental results on real world data sets show that our proposed approach generally outperforms the state-of-the-art recommendation algorithms that do not consider the knowledge level difference between the users.     

Implementing situation-aware and user-adaptive music recommendation service in semantic web and real-time multimedia computing environment

With the advent of the ubiquitous era, many studies have been devoted to various situation-aware services in the semantic web environment. One of the most challenging studies involves implementing a situation-aware personalized music recommendation service which considers the user’s situation and preferences. Situation-aware music recommendation requires multidisciplinary efforts including low-level feature extraction and analysis, music mood classification and human emotion prediction. In this paper, we propose a new scheme for a situation-aware/user-adaptive music recommendation service in the semantic web environment. To do this, we first discuss utilizing knowledge for analyzing and retrieving music contents semantically, and a user adaptive music recommendation scheme based on semantic web technologies that facilitates the development of domain knowledge and a rule set. Based on this discussion, we describe our Context-based Music Recommendation (COMUS) ontology for modeling the user’s musical preferences and contexts, and supporting reasoning about the user’s desired emotions and preferences. Basically, COMUS defines an upper music ontology that captures concepts on the general properties of music such as titles, artists and genres. In addition, it provides functionality for adding domain-specific ontologies, such as music features, moods and situations, in a hierarchical manner, for extensibility. Using this context ontology, we believe that logical reasoning rules can be inferred based on high-level (implicit) knowledge such as situations from low-level (explicit) knowledge. As an innovation, our ontology can express detailed and complicated relations among music clips, moods and situations, which enables users to find appropriate music. We present some of the experiments we performed as a case-study for music recommendation.     

基于遗忘函数的均值贝叶斯个性化排序算法研究

针对贝叶斯个性化排序算法未能充分应用用户的行为信息,导致算法在数据稀疏情况下推荐性能以及鲁棒性均大幅度降低的问题,提出了均值贝叶斯个性化排序(MBPR)算法,来进一步挖掘用户对隐式反馈信息的偏好关系。考虑到用户兴趣随时间变化的特征,又将遗忘函数引入MBPR算法中。该算法首先对用户的历史评分记录进行预处理;然后根据用户的评分信息对项目进行正负反馈的划分,对每名用户进行个性化建模,挖掘用户对未参与项目的喜好程度,生成推荐列表。为验证提出算法的推荐性能,在公开数据集MovieLens及Yahoo上进行分析和对比实验。实验结果表明该算法的推荐性能及鲁棒性较对比算法均有显著提高。     

A cognitive approach for agent-based personalized recommendation

There is an increasing need for various e-service, e-commerce and e-business sites to provide personalized recommendations to on-line customers. This paper proposes a new type of personalized recommendation agents called fuzzy cognitive agents. Fuzzy cognitive agents are designed to give personalized suggestions based on the user’s current personal preferences, other user’s common preferences, and expert’s domain knowledge. Fuzzy cognitive agents are able to represent knowledge via extended fuzzy cognitive maps, to learn users’ preferences from most recent cases and to help customers make inferences and decisions through numeric computation instead of symbolic and logic deduction. A case study is included to illustrate how personalized recommendations are made by fuzzy cognitive agents in e-commerce sites. The case study demonstrates that the fuzzy cognitive agent is both flexible and effective in supporting e-commerce applications.     

Modeling Temporal Dynamics of Users’ Purchase Behaviors for Next Basket Prediction

Next basket prediction attempts to provide sequential recommendations to users based on a sequence of the user’s previous purchases. Ideally, a good prediction model should be able to explore the personalized preference of the users, as well as the sequential relations of the items. This goal of modeling becomes even more challenging when both factors are time-dependent. However, existing methods either take these two aspects as static, or only consider temporal dynamics for one of the two aspects. In this work, we propose the dynamic representation learning approach for time-dependent next basket recommendation, which jointly models the dynamic nature of user preferences and item relations. To do so, we explicitly model the transaction timestamps, as well as the dynamic representations of both users and items, so as to capture the personalized user preference on each individual item dynamically. Experiments on three real-world retail datasets show that our method significantly outperforms several state-of-the-art methods for next basket recommendation.

     

A Novel Approach Based on Multi-View Content Analysis and Semi-Supervised Enrichment for Movie Recommendation

Although many existing movie recommender systems have investigated recommendation based on information such as clicks and tags, much less efforts have been made to explore the multimedia content of movies, which has potential information for the elicitation of the user’s visual and musical preferences.In this paper, we explore the content from three media types (image, text, audio) and propose a novel multi-view semi-supervised movie recommendation method, which represents each media type as a view space for movies.The three views of movies are integrated to predict the rating values under the multi-view framework.Furthermore, our method considers the casual users who rate limited movies.The algorithm enriches the user profile with a semi-supervised way when there are only few rating histories.Experiments indicate that the multimedia content analysis reveals the user’s profile in a more comprehensive way.Different media types can be a complement to each other for movie recommendation.And the experimental results validate that our semi-supervised method can effectively enrich the user profile for recommendation with limited rating history.     

一种基于用户播放行为序列的个性化视频推荐策略

本文针对在线视频服务网站的个性化推荐问题,提出了一种基于用户播放行为序列的个性化推荐策略.该策略通过深度神经网络词向量模型分析用户播放视频行为数据,将视频映射成等维度的特征向量,提取视频的语义特征.聚类用户播放历史视频的特征向量,建模用户兴趣分布矩阵.结合用户兴趣偏好和用户观看历史序列生成推荐列表.在大规模的视频服务系统中进行了离线实验,相比随机算法、基于物品的协同过滤和基于用户的协同过滤传统推荐策略,本方法在用户观看视频的Top-N推荐精确率方面平均分别获得22.3%、30.7%和934%的相对提升,在召回率指标上分别获得52.8%、41%和1065%的相对提升.进一步地与矩阵分解算法SVD++、基于双向LSTM模型和注意力机制的Bi-LSTM+Attention算法和基于用户行为序列的深度兴趣网络DIN比较,Top-N推荐精确率和召回率也得到了明显提升.该推荐策略不仅获得了较高的精确率和召回率,还尝试解决传统推荐面临大规模工业数据集时的数据要求严苛、数据稀疏和数据噪声等问题.     

A neural multi-context modeling framework for personalized attraction recommendation

In attraction recommendation scenarios, how to model multifaceted tourism contexts so as to accurately learn tourist preferences and attraction tourism features is a keystone of generating personalized recommendations. However, most of existing works generally focused on modeling spatiotemporal contexts of historical travel trajectories to learn tourists’ preferences, while neglected rich heterogeneous tourism side information, i.e., personal tourism constraints of tourists and tourism attributes of attractions. To this end, we propose a Neural Multi-context Modeling Framework (NMMF) to learn tourism feature representations of tourists and attractions by modeling multiple tourism contexts. Initially, we leverage a travel knowledge graph and massive original travelogues to construct the tourism attribute context of attractions and the travel trajectory context of tourists. Then, we design two context embedding models, named TKG2vec and Traj2vec, to model two kinds of context respectively. Both models learn feature vectors of tourist and attraction in contexts by elaborating neural networks to project each tourist and attraction into a uniform latent feature space. Finally, our framework integrates feature vectors derived from two models to acquire complete feature representations of tourists and attractions, and recommends personalized attractions by calculating the similarity between tourist and candidate attractions in the latent space. Experimental results on a real-world tourism dataset demonstrate our framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods in two personalized attraction recommendation tasks.