Dealing with incomplete information in a fuzzy linguistic recommender system to disseminate information in university digital libraries

As in the Web, the growing of information is the main problem of the academic digital libraries. Thus, similar tools could be applied in university digital libraries to facilitate the information access by the students and teachers. In [46] we presented a fuzzy linguistic recommender system to advice research resources in university digital libraries. The problem of this system is that the user profiles are provided directly by the own users and the process for acquiring user preferences is quite difficult because it requires too much user effort. In this paper we present a new fuzzy linguistic recommender system that facilitates the acquisition of the user preferences to characterize the user profiles. We allow users to provide their preferences by means of incomplete fuzzy linguistic preference relation. We include tools to manage incomplete information when the users express their preferences, and, in such a way, we show that the acquisition of the user profiles is improved.     

Web 2.0 Recommendation service by multi-collaborative filtering trust network algorithm

Recommendation Services (RS) are an essential part of online marketing campaigns. They make it possible to automatically suggest advertisements and promotions that fit the interests of individual users. Social networking websites, and the Web 2.0 in general, offer a collaborative online platform where users socialize, interact and discuss topics of interest with each other. These websites have created an abundance of information about users and their interests. The computational challenge however is to analyze and filter this information in order to generate useful recommendations for each user. Collaborative Filtering (CF) is a recommendation service technique that collects information from a user’s preferences and from trusted peer users in order to infer a new targeted suggestion. CF and its variants have been studied extensively in the literature on online recommending, marketing and advertising systems. However, most of the work done was based on Web 1.0, where all the information necessary for the computations is assumed to always be completely available. By contrast, in the distributed environment of Web 2.0, such as in current social networks, the required information may be either incomplete or scattered over different sources. In this paper, we propose the Multi-Collaborative Filtering Trust Network algorithm, an improved version of the CF algorithm designed to work on the Web 2.0 platform. Our simulation experiments show that the new algorithm yields a clear improvement in prediction accuracy compared to the original CF algorithm.     

基于对抗采样的社交推荐算法

推荐系统利用用户的历史记录、物品的基础信息等数据进行建模来捕获用户的偏好,有效缓解了信息过载等问题,虽然其已应用广泛,但整个推荐领域面临的挑战却依旧存在,其中数据稀疏这一问题对于推荐性能有举足轻重的影响。近年来,大量研究表明基于社交信息的推荐算法能够有效缓解数据稀疏问题,但它们也仍然存在一定的局限。线上的社交网络是非常稀疏的,并且线上社交网络中的“朋友”通常包括同学、同事、亲戚等,因此,拥有显式朋友关系的用户不一定拥有相似的偏好,即直接利用显式朋友的兴趣偏好进行推荐会存在噪声问题。此外,大部分基于隐式反馈的算法通常直接对用户没有交互过的物品进行随机采样,然后将其作为用户实际交互过的物品的负样本来优化模型,然而用户没有交互过的物品并不代表用户不喜欢,这种粗粒度的采样策略忽略了用户的真实偏好,同样也带来了一定程度的噪声。生成对抗网络（GANs）因其在训练中捕获复杂数据分布的能力以及强大的鲁棒性被广泛应用到推荐系统中,为了减弱上述噪声问题带来的影响,本文基于生成对抗网络提出了一种细粒度的对抗采样推荐模型（ASGAN）,包括一个生成器和判别器。其中,生成器首先利用图表示学习技术初始化社交网络,接着为用户生成一个与其偏好相似的朋友,然后再从该朋友喜欢的物品集中同时生成该用户喜欢的物品和用户不喜欢的物品。判别器则尽可能区分出用户实际交互过的物品和生成器生成的两类物品。随着对抗训练的进行,生成器能更有效地进行社交朋友采样和物品采样,而判别器能够良好地捕获用户的真实偏好分布。最后,在三个公开的真实数据集上与现有的六个工作进行对比,实验结果证明：ASGAN拥有更好的推荐性能,通过重构社交网络和细粒度采样有效缓解了社交信息和物品采样策略带来的噪声问题。     

Improving user experience with case-based reasoning systems using text mining and Web 2.0

Many CBR systems have been developed in the past. However, currently many CBR systems are facing a sustainability issue such as outdated cases and stagnant case growth. Some CBR systems have fallen into disuse due to the lack of new cases, case update, user participation and user engagement. To encourage the use of CBR systems and give users better experience, CBR system developers need to come up with new ways to add new features and values to the CBR systems. The author proposes a framework to use text mining and Web 2.0 technologies to improve and enhance CBR systems for providing better user experience. Two case studies were conducted to evaluate the usefulness of text mining techniques and Web 2.0 technologies for enhancing a large scale CBR system. The results suggest that text mining and Web 2.0 are promising ways to bring additional values to CBR and they should be incorporated into the CBR design and development process for the benefit of CBR users.     

Adaptive hypertext navigation based on user goals and context

Hypertext systems allow flexible access to topics of information, but this flexibility has disadvantages. Users often become lost or overwhelmed by choices. An adaptive hypertext system can overcome these disadvantages by recommending information to users based on their specific information needs and preferences. Simple associative matrices provide an effective way of capturing these user preferences. Because the matrices are easily updated, they support the kind of dynamic learning required in an adaptive system.HYPERFLEX, a prototype of an adaptive hypertext system that learns, is described. Informal studies with HYPERFLEX clarify the circumstances under which adaptive systems are likely to be useful, and suggest that HYPERFLEX can reduce time spent searching for information by up to 40%. Moreover, these benefits can be obtained with relatively little effort on the part of hypertext authors or users.The simple models underlying HYPERFLEX's performance may offer a general and useful alternative to more sophisticated modelling techniques. Conditions under which these models, and similar adaptation techniques, might be most useful are discussed.     

Research opportunities for argumentation in social networks

Nowadays, many websites allow social networking between their users in an explicit or implicit way. In this work, we show how argumentation schemes theory can provide a valuable help to formalize and structure on-line discussions and user opinions in decision support and business oriented websites that held social networks between their users. Two real case studies are studied and analysed. Then, guidelines to enhance social decision support and recommendations with argumentation are provided.     

SmallWorlds: Visualizing Social Recommendations

We present SmallWorlds, a visual interactive graph‐based interface that allows users to specify, refine and build item‐preference profiles in a variety of domains. The interface facilitates expressions of taste through simple graph interactions and these preferences are used to compute personalized, fully transparent item recommendations for a target user. Predictions are based on a collaborative analysis of preference data from a user's direct peer group on a social network. We find that in addition to receiving transparent and accurate item recommendations, users also learn a wealth of information about the preferences of their peers through interaction with our visualization. Such information is not easily discoverable in traditional text based interfaces. A detailed analysis of our design choices for visual layout, interaction and prediction techniques is presented. Our evaluations discuss results from a user study in which SmallWorlds was deployed as an interactive recommender system on Facebook.     

Coherence and inconsistencies in rating behavior: estimating the magic barrier of recommender systems

Recommender Systems have to deal with a wide variety of users and user types that express their preferences in different ways. This difference in user behavior can have a profound impact on the performance of the recommender system. Users receive better (or worse) recommendations depending on the quantity and the quality of the information the system knows about them. Specifically, the inconsistencies in users’ preferences impose a lower bound on the error the system may achieve when predicting ratings for one particular user—this is referred to as the magic barrier. In this work, we present a mathematical characterization of the magic barrier based on the assumption that user ratings are afflicted with inconsistencies—noise. Furthermore, we propose a measure of the consistency of user ratings (rating coherence) that predicts the performance of recommendation methods. More specifically, we show that user coherence is correlated with the magic barrier; we exploit this correlation to discriminate between easy users (those with a lower magic barrier) and difficult ones (those with a higher magic barrier). We report experiments where the recommendation error for the more coherent users is lower than that of the less coherent ones. We further validate these results by using two public datasets, where the necessary data to identify the magic barrier is not available, in which we obtain similar performance improvements.     

基于协同过滤的水果推荐系统设计与实现

随着大数据技术的飞速发展,从大量的信息中如何让用户发现和挖掘出有价值的信息,一直是人们研究的热点问题。推荐系统的发展起到了关键作用,主要是发现用户和商品之间的信息,一方面为用户找到有价值的信息,另一方面为用户推荐感兴趣的商品,从而实现了用户和信息生成者的共赢。基于协同过滤的水果推荐系统通过分析用户的历史行为了解用户的喜好,在为用户提供其感兴趣的信息的同时,也能够实现个性化的推荐。     

Dynamic adaptation of numerical attributes in a user profile

Recommender systems try to help users in their decisions by analyzing and ranking the available alternatives according to their preferences and interests, modeled in user profiles. The discovery and dynamic update of the users’ preferences are key issues in the development of these systems. In this work we propose to use the information provided by a user during his/her interaction with a recommender system to infer his/her preferences over the criteria used to define the decision alternatives. More specifically, this paper pays special attention on how to learn the user’s preferred value in the case of numerical attributes. A methodology to adapt the user profile in a dynamic and automatic way is presented. The adaptations in the profile are performed after each interaction of the user with the system and/or after the system has gathered enough information from several user selections. We have developed a framework for the automatic evaluation of the performance of the adaptation algorithm that permits to analyze the influence of different parameters. The obtained results show that the adaptation algorithm is able to learn a very accurate model of the user preferences after a certain amount of interactions with him/her, even if the preferences change dynamically over time.     

An OWA‐Based Ranking Approach for University Books Recommendation

Generally the book recommendation approaches are personalized in nature, that is, they utilize the users’ purchasing behavior to recommend them the book similar to their preferences. The main problem with the personalized recommendation is its knowledge requirement about users’ past preferences. As a result, these techniques fail in producing appropriate recommendation for a new user whose preferences are not known. The personalized recommendation also needs extra space to store the users’ preferences. In this paper, a framework to recommend books to university students for their studies is presented. In order to answer which books are to be included in the syllabus, a specialized way of recommendation, where recommendations from experts of the subjects at different universities are considered, is presented. We have suggested a ranked recommendation approach for books, which employ Ordered Weighted Aggregation (OWA), a fuzzy‐based aggregation, to aggregate the several ranking of the top universities. On the one hand, it does not need user prior preferences, and on the other hand, it eases the complexities of personalized recommendation to huge number of users and replaces it with a single ranked recommendation. The experimental results are compared with the existing positional aggregation algorithm that demonstrates significant improvement in the results with respect to various performance metrics.     

基于社交关系和用户偏好的多样性图推荐方法

以协同过滤为代表的传统推荐算法能够为用户提供准确率较高的推荐列表,但忽略了推荐系统中另外一个重要的衡量标准:多样性。随着社交网络的日益发展,大量冗余和重复的信息充斥其间,信息过载使得快速、有效地发现用户的兴趣爱好变得更加困难。针对某个用户推荐最能满足其兴趣爱好的物品,需要具备显著的相关度且能覆盖用户广泛的兴趣爱好。因此,基于社交关系和用户偏好提出一种面向多样性和相关度的图排序框架。首先,引入社交关系图模型,综合考虑用户及物品之间的关系,以更好地建模它们的相关度;然后,利用线性模型融合多样性和相关性两个重要指标;最后,利用Spark GraphX并行图计算框架实现该算法,并在真实的数据集上通过实验验证所提方法的有效性和扩展性。     

Finding Similar Users in Social Networks

We consider a system where users wish to find similar users. To model similarity, we assume the existence of a set of queries, and two users are deemed similar if their answers to these queries are (mostly) identical. Technically, each user has a vector of preferences (answers to queries), and two users are similar if their preference vectors differ in only a few coordinates. The preferences are unknown to the system initially, and the goal of the algorithm is to classify the users into classes of roughly the same preferences by asking each user to answer the least possible number of queries. We prove nearly matching lower and upper bounds on the maximal number of queries required to solve the problem. Specifically, we present an “anytime” algorithm that asks each user at most one query in each round, while maintaining a partition of the users. The quality of the partition improves over time: for n users and time T, groups of [(O)\tilde](n/T)\tilde{O}(n/T) users with the same preferences will be separated (with high probability) if they differ in sufficiently many queries. We present a lower bound that matches the upper bound, up to a constant factor, for nearly all possible distances between user groups.     

A knowledge and collaboration-based CBR process to improve network performance-related support activities

In a context characterized by a growing demand for networked services, users of advanced applications sometimes face network performance troubles that may actually prevent them from completing their tasks. Therefore, providing assistance for user communities that have difficulties using the network has been identified as one of the major issues of performance-related support activities. Despite the advances network management has made over the last years, there is a lack of guidance services to provide users with information that goes beyond merely presenting network properties. In this light, the research community has been highlighting the importance of User-Perceived Quality (UPQ) scores during the evaluation of network services for network applications, such as Quality of Experience (QoE) and Mean Opinion Score (MOS). However, despite their potential to assist end-users to deal with network performance troubles, only few types of network applications have well established UPQ scores. Besides that, they are defined through experiments essentially conducted in laboratory, rather than actual usage. This paper thus presents a knowledge and Collaboration-based Network Users’ Support (CNUS) Case-Based Reasoning (CBR) Process that predicts UPQ scores to assist users by focusing on the collaboration among them through the sharing of their experiences in using network applications. It builds (i) a knowledge base that includes not only information about network performance problems, but also applications’ characteristics, (ii) a case base that contains users’ opinions, and (iii) a user database that stores users’ profiles. By processing them, CNUS benefits users through the indication of the degree of satisfaction they may achieve based on the general opinion from members of their communities in similar contexts. In order to evaluate the suitability of CNUS, a CBR system was built and validated through an experimental study conducted in laboratory with a multi-agent system that simulated scenarios where users request for assistance. The simulation was supported by an ontology of network services and applications and reputation scheme implemented through the PageRank algorithm. The results of the study pointed to the effectiveness of CNUS, and its resilience to users’ collusive and incoherent behaviors. Besides that, they showed the influence of the knowledge about network characteristics, users’ profiles and application features on computer-based support activities.     

User support: revealing structure instead of surface

The development of different help systems and the application of numerous approaches to user support have shown (a) that end-users may encounter insuperably complex use situations, and (b) that it is possible to assist users significantly by implementing computerized help systems. There are many approaches to the realization of user support, varying from the use of natural language to user modelling. However, the current help systems seem to focus on relatively technical data processing issues, ignoring the organizational context in which the use takes place. It is asserted in this paper that it is relevant for users to perceive the organizational context and that it is possible to reflect the context in a support system. Representing the context in a support system is made possible by introducing a context database. A context database is parallel to the actual database and contains information about task flows, task-connected information objects and the like. Therefore the analysis of work and information systems has to be based on related areas. The areas of inquiry are (a) tasks, (b) job design, (c) organization of work, (d) computer applications and (e) information media. The following kinds of mappings can be incorporated within the context database: [organizational unit Ol]-T_person PI in job]-[job task Tl]-[task-connected information Il]-[task-connected information 12]-[job task T2]-[person in job P2]-[organizational unit O2], This type of chain (or parts of it) can then be visualized as context support.     

Learning personal preferences on online newspaper articles from user behaviors

This paper discusses methods by which user preferences for WWW-based newspaper articles can be learned from user behaviors. Two modes of inference were compared in an experiment: one using explicit feedback and the other using implicit feedback. In the explicit feedback mode, the users score all articles according to their relevance. In the implicit feedback mode, the user reads articles by performing scrolling and enlarging operations, and the system infers from the operations how much the user was interested in each article. Our newspaper on the WWW, called ANATAGONOMY, has a learning engine and a scoring engine on the server. The system users read daily news articles by using a WWW browser in which there is an interaction agent that monitors the user behaviors. The learning engine on the server infers user preferences from the interaction agent, and the scoring engine scores new articles and creates personalized newspaper pages based on the extracted user profiles. In an experiment, the system was able to personalize the newspaper to some extent when using only implicit feedback when some parameters were properly set, but the personalization was not as precise as it was when explicit feedback was used. By mixing explicit feedback with implicit feedback, the system could personalize newspapers quickly and precisely without requiring too much effort on the part of the users. User preferences can also be used to construct information retrieval agents or even to create cyberspace communities of the users that have similar interests. We think that the proposed technique for learning user preferences greatly enhances the value of the WWW.     

Share with strangers: Privacy bubbles as user-centered privacy control for mobile content sharing applications

A continually increasing number of pictures and videos is shared in online social networks. Current sharing platforms, however, only offer limited options to define who has access to the content. Users may either share it with individuals or groups from their social graph, or make it available to the general public. Sharing content with users to which no social ties exist, even if they were physically close to the places where content was created and witnessed the same event, is however not supported by most existing platforms. We thus propose a novel approach to share content with such users based on so-called privacy bubbles. Privacy bubbles metaphorically represent the private sphere of the users and automatically confine the access to the content generated by the bubble creator to people within the bubble. Bubbles extend in both time and space, centered around the collection time and place, and their size can be adapted to the user's preferences. We confirm the user acceptance of our concept through a questionnaire-based study with 175 participants, and a prototype implementation shows the technical feasibility of our scheme.     

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.     

融合社交信息的局部潜在空间推荐方法

随着社交网络的发展,越来越多的研究利用社交信息来改进传统推荐算法的性能,然而现有的推荐算法大多忽略了用户兴趣的多样化,未考虑用户在不同社交维度中关心的层面不同,导致推荐质量较差.为了解决这个问题,提出了一种同时考虑全局潜在因子和不同子集特定潜在因子的推荐方法LSFS,使得推荐过程既考虑了用户共享偏好又考虑了用户在不同子集中的特定偏好.考虑到参与到不同社交维度的用户对不同的项目感兴趣,首先根据用户的社交关系将用户划分到不同的子集中;其次通过截断奇异值分解技术建模用户对项目的评分,其中全局潜在因子捕获用户共享的层面,而不同用户子集的特定潜在因子捕获用户关心的特定层面;最后,结合全局与局部潜在因子预测用户对未评分项目的评分.实验结果表明该方法可行且有效.     

一种CBR与RBR相结合的智能家庭推理系统*

介绍了一种CBR与RBR相结合的智能家庭推理系统。将CBR与RBR两种人工智能技术相结合,运用于普适计算的典型应用智能家庭中,首先通过RBR推理出当前用户的活动以及心情等较高级上下文;然后再用CBR进行上下文的再处理,融合多类型或历史的上下文,自动预测相似度最大的上下文,并基于该上下文为用户提供个性化服务。