A context-aware recommender method based on text and opinion mining

A recommender system is an information filtering technology that can be used to recommend items that may be of interest to users. Additionally, there are the context-aware recommender systems that consider contextual information to generate the recommendations. Reviews can provide relevant information that can be used by recommender systems, including contextual and opinion information. In a previous work, we proposed a context-aware recommendation method based on text mining (CARM-TM). The method includes two techniques to extract context from reviews: CIET.5_embed, a technique based on word embeddings; and RulesContext, a technique based on association rules. In this work, we have extended our previous method by including CEOM, a new technique which extracts context by using aspect-based opinions. We call our extension of CARM-TOM (context-aware recommendation method based on text and opinion mining). To generate recommendations, our method makes use of the CAMF algorithm, a context-aware recommender based on matrix factorization. To evaluate CARM-TOM, we ran an extensive set of experiments in a dataset about restaurants, comparing CARM-TOM against the MF algorithm, an uncontextual recommender system based on matrix factorization; and against a context extraction method proposed in literature. The empirical results strongly indicate that our method is able to improve a context-aware recommender system.     

PathRank: Ranking nodes on a heterogeneous graph for flexible hybrid recommender systems

We present a flexible hybrid recommender system that can emulate collaborative-filtering, Content-based Filtering, context-aware recommendation, and combinations of any of these recommendation semantics. The recommendation problem is modeled as a problem of finding the most relevant nodes for a given set of query nodes on a heterogeneous graph. However, existing node ranking measures cannot fully exploit the semantics behind the different types of nodes and edges in a heterogeneous graph. To overcome the limitation, we present a novel random walk based node ranking measure, PathRank, by extending the Personalized PageRank algorithm. The proposed measure can produce node ranking results with varying semantics by discriminating the different paths on a heterogeneous graph. The experimental results show that our method can produce more diverse and effective recommendation results compared to existing approaches.     

Progress in context-aware recommender systems — An overview

Recommender Systems are the set of tools and techniques to provide useful recommendations and suggestions to the users to help them in the decision-making process for choosing the right products or services. The recommender systems tailored to leverage contextual information (such as location, time, companion or such) in the recommendation process are called context-aware recommender systems. This paper presents a review on the continual development of context-aware recommender systems by analyzing different kinds of contexts without limiting to any specific application domain. First, an in-depth analysis is conducted on different recommendation algorithms used in context-aware recommender systems. Then this information is used to find out that how these techniques deals with the curse of dimensionality, which is an inherent issue in such systems. Since contexts are primarily based on users’ activity patterns that leads to the development of personalized recommendation services for the users. Thus, this paper also presents a review on how this contextual information is represented (either explicitly or implicitly) in the recommendation process. We also presented a list of datasets and evaluation metrics used in the setting of CARS. We tried to highlight that how algorithmic approaches used in CARS differ from those of conventional RS. In that, we presented what modification or additions are being applied on the top of conventional recommendation approaches to produce context-aware recommendations. Finally, the outstanding challenges and research opportunities are presented in front of the research community for analysis     

Mathematical modeling of group product recommendation with partial information: How many ratings do we need?

Product recommendation is one of the most important services in the Internet. In this paper, we consider a product recommendation system which recommends products to a group of users. The recommendation system only has partial preference information on this group of users: a user only indicates his preference to a small subset of products in the form of ratings. This partial preference information makes it a challenge to produce an accurate recommendation. In this work, we explore a number of fundamental questions. What is the desired number of ratings per product so to guarantee an accurate recommendation? What are some effective voting rules in summarizing ratings? How users’ misbehavior such as cheating, in product rating may affect the recommendation accuracy? What are some efficient rating schemes? To answer these questions, we present a formal mathematical model of a group recommendation system. We formally analyze the model. Through this analysis we gain the insight to develop a randomized algorithm which is both computationally efficient and asymptotically accurate in evaluating the recommendation accuracy under a very general setting. We propose a novel and efficient heterogeneous rating scheme which requires equal or less rating workload, but can improve over a homogeneous rating scheme by as much as 30%. We carry out experiments on both synthetic data and real-world data from TripAdvisor. Not only we validate our model, but also we obtain a number of interesting observations, i.e., a small of misbehaving users can decrease the recommendation accuracy remarkably. For TripAdvisor, one hundred ratings per product is sufficient to guarantee a high accuracy recommendation. We believe our model and methodology are important building blocks to refine and improve applications of group recommendation systems.     

基于深度学习的情境感知推荐系统研究进展

传统的推荐系统存在数据高度稀疏、冷启动及用户偏好建模难等问题,而把情境信息融入推荐系统中能有效缓解此类问题.深度学习技术已经成为人工智能领域研究热点,把深度学习应用在情境感知推荐系统当中,为推荐领域的研究带来新的机遇与挑战.本文从情境感知推荐系统相关概念出发,综合整理国内外研究相关文献,介绍深度学习技术融入情境感知推荐系统相关应用模型,提出了基于深度学习的情境感知推荐系统研究的不足以及对未来的展望.     

A data-mining approach to preference-based data ranking founded on contextual information

The term information overload was already used back in the 1970s by Alvin Toffler in his book Future Shock, and refers to the difficulty to understand and make decisions when too much information is available. In the era of Big Data, this problem becomes much more dramatic, since users may be literally overwhelmed by the cataract of data accessible in the most varied forms. With context-aware data tailoring, given a target application, in each specific context the system allows the user to access only the view which is relevant for that application in that context. Moreover, the relative importance of information to the same user in a different context or, reciprocally, to a different user in the same context, may vary enormously; for this reason, contextual preferences can be used to further refine the views associated with contexts, by imposing a ranking on the data of each context-aware view. In this paper, we propose a methodology and a system, PREMINE (PREference MINEr), where data mining is adopted to infer contextual preferences from the past interaction of the user with contextual views over a relational database, gathering knowledge in terms of association rules between each context and the relevant data.     

CAESAR: context-aware explanation based on supervised attention for service recommendations

Explainable recommendations have drawn more attention from both academia and industry recently, because they can help users better understand recommendations (i.e., why some particular items are recommended), therefore improving the persuasiveness of the recommender system and users’ satisfaction. However, little work has been done to provide explanations from the angle of a user’s contextual situations (e.g., companion, season, and destination if the recommendation is a hotel). To fill this research gap, we propose a new context-aware recommendation algorithm based on supervised attention mechanism (CAESAR), which particularly matches latent features to explicit contextual features as mined from user-generated reviews for producing context-aware explanations. Experimental results on two large datasets in hotel and restaurant service domains demonstrate that our model improves recommendation performance against the state-of-the-art methods and furthermore is able to return feature-level explanations that can adapt to the target user’s current contexts.

     

User comments for news recommendation in forum-based social media

News recommendation and user interaction are important features in many Web-based news services. The former helps users identify the most relevant news for further information. The latter enables collaborated information sharing among users with their comments following news postings. This research is intended to marry these two features together for an adaptive recommender system that utilizes reader comments to refine the recommendation of news in accordance with the evolving topic. This then turns the traditional “push-data” type of news recommendation to “discussion” moderator that can intelligently assist online forums. In addition, to alleviate the problem of recommending essentially identical articles, the relationship (duplicate, generalization, or specialization) between recommended news articles and the original posting is investigated. Our experiments indicate that our proposed solutions provide an improved news recommendation service in forum-based social media.     

Agent-based architecture for context-aware and personalized event recommendation

In order to offer context-aware and personalized information, intelligent processing techniques are necessary. Different initiatives considering many contexts have been proposed, but users preferences need to be learned to offer contextualized and personalized services, products or information. Therefore, this paper proposes an agent-based architecture for context-aware and personalized event recommendation based on ontology and the spreading algorithm. The use of ontology allows to define the domain knowledge model, while the spreading activation algorithm learns user patterns by discovering user interests. The proposed agent-based architecture was validated with the modeling and implementation of eAgora? application, which was illustrated at the pervasive university context.     

A collaborative user-centered framework for recommending items in Online Social Networks

Recommender Systems are more and more playing an important role in our life, representing useful tools helping users to find “what they need” from a very large number of candidates and supporting people in making decisions in various contexts: what items to buy, which movie to watch, or even who they can invite to their social network, etc. In this paper, we propose a novel collaborative user-centered recommendation approach in which several aspects related to users and available in Online Social Networks – i.e. preferences (usually in the shape of items’ metadata), opinions (textual comments to which it is possible to associate a sentiment), behavior (in the majority of cases logs of past items’ observations made by users), feedbacks (usually expressed in the form of ratings) – are considered and integrated together with items’ features and context information within a general framework that can support different applications using proper customizations (e.g., recommendation of news, photos, movies, travels, etc.). Experiments on system accuracy and user satisfaction in several domains shows how our approach provides very promising and interesting results.     

Context-aware mobile service for routing the fastest subway path

The rapid growth of the IT industry during the last few decades has increased demands on mobile devices such as PDAs, cellular phones, and GPS navigation systems. With emerging concepts of context-aware computing, the mobile devices can provide mobile users with timely information by using not only common knowledge but also environmental context such as current time and location. Lately, the context-aware applications have been actively investigated and have been contributed to numerous application areas such as real-time electronic catalogues and navigation systems for tourists. In this paper, we propose a new context-aware application for finding the fastest subway route. We have developed the proposed application as an implemented system named Optimize Your Time System (OYT System, for short). A terminal device of the OYT System is equipped with a GPS receiver and the system’s server contains a timetable of all trains in a target subway system. On perceiving users’ context such as current time and location automatically from GPS, the OYT System can display the optimal route which takes the shortest time for the user to reach the specified destination. In this paper, we present details of the OYT System and some experimental examples.     

Graph convolution machine for context-aware recommender system

The latest advance in recommendation shows that better user and item representations can be learned via performing graph convolutions on the user-item interaction graph. However, such finding is mostly restricted to the collaborative filtering (CF) scenario, where the interaction contexts are not available. In this work, we extend the advantages of graph convolutions to context-aware recommender system (CARS, which represents a generic type of models that can handle various side information). We propose Graph Convolution Machine (GCM), an end-to-end framework that consists of three components: an encoder, graph convolution (GC) layers, and a decoder. The encoder projects users, items, and contexts into embedding vectors, which are passed to the GC layers that refine user and item embeddings with context-aware graph convolutions on the user-item graph. The decoder digests the refined embeddings to output the prediction score by considering the interactions among user, item, and context embeddings. We conduct experiments on three real-world datasets from Yelp and Amazon, validating the effectiveness of GCM and the benefits of performing graph convolutions for CARS.     

Adaptive backstepping control of uncertain systems with unknown input time-delay

In this paper, we establish the robustness of adaptive controllers designed using the standard backstepping technique with respect to unmodeled dynamics involving unknown input time delay. While noting that some results on robust stabilization of non-minimum phase systems using the backstepping technique are available, we realize that the standard adaptive backstepping technique has only been shown applicable to unknown minimum phase systems. Another significance of our result is to enable the class of systems stablizable by adaptive backstepping controllers to cross the boundary of minimum phase systems, since systems with input time delay belong to non-minimum phase systems. Moreover, the L₂ and L_∞ norms of the system output are also established as functions of design parameters. This implies that the transient system performance can be adjusted by choosing suitable design parameters.     

Mitigation of symmetry condition in positive realness for adaptive control

Feasibility of nonlinear and adaptive control methodologies in multivariable linear time-invariant systems with state-space realization {A,B,C} is apparently limited by the standard strictly positive realness conditions that imply that the product CB must be positive definite symmetric. This paper expands the applicability of the strictly positive realness conditions used for the proofs of stability of adaptive control or control with uncertainty by showing that the not necessarily symmetric CB is only required to have a diagonal Jordan form and positive eigenvalues. The paper also shows that under the new condition any minimum-phase systems can be made strictly positive real via constant output feedback. The paper illustrates the usefulness of these extended properties with an adaptive control example.     

基于情境感知的个性化推荐算法

随着互联网的快速发展,只涉及用户和项目的传统个性化推荐已不能满足推荐要求的效率和准确率.因此,情景感知个性化推荐服务引起了广泛关注,成为新的研究热点.本文分析了情境的定义、情景感知个性化推荐模型,并提出了一种基于情境信息降低维度的关联规则推荐模型.最后,以视频网站的web日志为数据源,融合时间情境因素,实现了基于时间情境划分的关联规则推荐算法,并和传统推荐算法进行对比分析,实验证明,情境感知推荐算法具有更高的准确率和召回率.     

A Deep Learning Based Approach for Context-Aware Multi-Criteria Recommender Systems

Recommender systems are similar to an information filtering system that helps identify items that best satisfy the users’ demands based on their preference profiles. Context-aware recommender systems (CARSs) and multi-criteria recommender systems (MCRSs) are extensions of traditional recommender systems. CARSs have integrated additional contextual information such as time, place, and so on for providing better recommendations. However, the majority of CARSs use ratings as a unique criterion for building communities. Meanwhile, MCRSs utilize user preferences in multiple criteria to better generate recommendations. Up to now, how to exploit context in MCRSs is still an open issue. This paper proposes a novel approach, which relies on deep learning for context-aware multi-criteria recommender systems. We apply deep neural network (DNN) models to predict the context-aware multi-criteria ratings and learn the aggregation function. We conduct experiments to evaluate the effect of this approach on the real-world dataset. A significant result is that our method outperforms other state-of-the-art methods for recommendation effectiveness.     

A set-theoretic model reference adaptive control architecture with dead-zone effect

A new set-theoretic model reference adaptive control architecture with dead-zone effect is presented. The key feature of our approach utilizes a new generalized restricted potential function, where it not only provides a user-defined uncertain dynamical system performance but also has the capability to stop the adaptation when system errors are small (i.e., inside dead-zone) — a practice adopted in adaptive control applications. The stability of the proposed technique is analyzed through showing the boundedness of an energy function in all possible variations and its experimental validation is also given through an aerospace testbed.     

Decentralized adaptive stabilization for interconnected systems with dynamic input-output and nonlinear interactions

This paper considers the problem of robust decentralized adaptive output feedback stabilization for a class of interconnected systems with dynamic input and output interactions and nonlinear interactions by using MT-filters and the backstepping design method. It is shown that the closed-loop decentralized system based on MT-filters is globally uniformly bounded, all the signals except for the parameter estimates can be regulated to zero asymptotically, and the L₂ and L_∞ norms of the system outputs are also be bounded by functions of design parameters. The scheme is demonstrated by a simulation example.     

Optimal reset adaptive observer design

A reset adaptive observer (ReAO) is an adaptive observer consisting of an integrator and a reset law that resets the output of the integrator depending on a predefined reset condition. The inclusion of reset elements can improve the observer performance but it can also destroy the stability of the estimation process if the ReAO is not properly tuned. As contribution, a method to optimally tune the parameters and gains of the ReAO is presented. They are optimally chosen by solving the L₂ gain minimization problem, which can be rewritten as an equivalent LMI problem. The effectiveness of the proposed method is checked by simulations comparing the results of an optimal ReAO with an optimal traditional adaptive observer.     

上下文感知旅游推荐系统研究综述

随着人们生活水平的提高，旅游已成为一项普遍的休闲活动，进而推动了旅游推荐方面技术的研究。与传统推荐系统相比，除了考虑游客和旅游产品的相关特征之外，旅游推荐系统的推荐质量在很大程度上受到位置、时间、天气、游客社交群体等上下文信息的影响。本文首先给出上下文感知旅游推荐系统的总体框架；然后对位置、时间、游客社会化网络和多维上下文等4类典型的上下文信息在旅游推荐系统中的应用进行了详细考察，并对综合应用各种上下文信息的旅游推荐系统进行了分析；从旅游推荐产品的角度对推荐系统进行分类考察；最后讨论了上下文感知旅游推荐系统目前面临的重点和难点问题，指出下一步的研究方向。