Ontology-Based Recommendation of Editorial Products

Major academic publishers need to be able to analyse their vast catalogue of products and select the best items to be marketed in scientific venues. This is a complex exercise that requires characterising with a high precision the topics of thousands of books and matching them with the interests of the relevant communities. In Springer Nature, this task has been traditionally handled manually by publishing editors. However, the rapid growth in the number of scientific publications and the dynamic nature of the Computer Science landscape has made this solution increasingly inefficient. We have addressed this issue by creating Smart Book Recommender (SBR), an ontology-based recommender system developed by The Open University (OU) in collaboration with Springer Nature, which supports their Computer Science editorial team in selecting the products to market at specific venues. SBR recommends books, journals, and conference proceedings relevant to a conference by taking advantage of a semantically enhanced representation of about 27K editorial products. This is based on the Computer Science Ontology, a very large-scale, automatically generated taxonomy of research areas. SBR also allows users to investigate why a certain publication was suggested by the system. It does so by means of an interactive graph view that displays the topic taxonomy of the recommended editorial product and compares it with the topic-centric characterization of the input conference. An evaluation carried out with seven Springer Nature editors and seven OU researchers has confirmed the effectiveness of the solution

Leveraging interfaces to improve recommendation diversity

Increasing diversity in the output of a recommender system is an active research question for solving a long-tail issue. Most of the current approaches have focused on ranked list optimization to improve recommendation diversity. However, little is known about the e.ect that a visual interface can have on this issue. .is paper shows that a multidimensional visualization promotes diversity of social exploration in the context of an academic conference. Our study shows a significant difference in the exploration pa.ern between ranked list and visual interfaces. .e results show that a visual interface can help the user explore a a more diverse set of recommended items

A Collaborative Filtering Probabilistic Approach for Recommendation to Large Homogeneous and Automatically Detected Groups

In the collaborative filtering recommender systems (CFRS) field, recommendation to group of users is mainly focused on stablished, occasional or random groups. These groups have a little number of users: relatives, friends, colleagues, etc. Our proposal deals with large numbers of automatically detected groups. Marketing and electronic commerce are typical targets of large homogenous groups. Large groups present a major difficulty in terms of automatically achieving homogeneity, equilibrated size and accurate recommendations. We provide a method that combines diverse machine learning algorithms in an original way: homogeneous groups are detected by means of a clustering based on hidden factors instead of ratings. Predictions are made using a virtual user model, and virtual users are obtained by performing a hidden factors aggregation. Additionally, this paper selects the most appropriate dimensionality reduction for the explained RS aim. We conduct a set of experiments to catch the maximum cumulative deviation of the ratings information. Results show an improvement on recommendations made to large homogeneous groups. It is also shown the desirability of designing specific methods and algorithms to deal with automatically detected groups

Joint Workshop on Interfaces and Human Decision Making for Recommender Systems (IntRS’21)

Recommender systems were originally developed as interactive intelligent systems that can proactively guide users to items that match their preferences. Despite its origin on the crossroads of HCI and AI, the majority of research on recommender systems gradually focused on objective accuracy criteria paying less and less attention to how users interact with the system as well as the efficacy of interface designs from users’ perspectives. This trend is reversing with the increased volume of research that looks beyond algorithms, into users’ interactions, decision making processes, and overall experience. The series of workshops on Interfaces and Human Decision Making for Recommender Systems focuses on the "human side" of recommender systems. The goal of the research stream featured at the workshop is to improve users’ overall experience with recommender systems by integrating different theories of human decision making into the construction of recommender systems and exploring better interfaces for recommender systems. In this summary,we introduce the JointWorkshop on Interfaces and Human Decision Making for Recommender Systems at RecSys’21, review its history, and discuss most important topics considered at the workshop

Where could we go? Recommendations for groups in location-based social networks

| openaire: EC/H2020/654024/EU//SoBigDataLocation-Based Social Networks (LBSNs) enable their users to share with their friends the places they go to and whom they go with. Additionally, they provide users with recommendations for Points of Interest (POI) they have not visited before. This functionality is of great importance for users of LBSNs, as it allows them to discover interesting places in populous cities that are not easy to explore. For this reason, previous research has focused on providing recommendations to LBSN users. Nevertheless, while most existing work focuses on recommendations for individual users, techniques to provide recommendations to groups of users are scarce. In this paper, we consider the problem of recommending a list of POIs to a group of users in the areas that the group frequents. Our data consist of activity on Swarm, a social networking app by Foursquare, and our results demonstrate that our proposed Geo-Group-Recommender (GGR), a class of hybrid recommender systems that combine the group geographical preferences using Kernel Density Estimation, category and location features and group check-ins outperform a large number of other recommender systems. Moreover, we find evidence that user preferences differ both in venue category and in location between individual and group activities. We also show that combining individual recommendations using group aggregation strategies is not as good as building a profile for a group. Our experiments show that (GGR) outperforms the baselines in terms of precision and recall at different cutoffs.Peer reviewe