824 research outputs found
Current Challenges and Visions in Music Recommender Systems Research
Music recommender systems (MRS) have experienced a boom in recent years,
thanks to the emergence and success of online streaming services, which
nowadays make available almost all music in the world at the user's fingertip.
While today's MRS considerably help users to find interesting music in these
huge catalogs, MRS research is still facing substantial challenges. In
particular when it comes to build, incorporate, and evaluate recommendation
strategies that integrate information beyond simple user--item interactions or
content-based descriptors, but dig deep into the very essence of listener
needs, preferences, and intentions, MRS research becomes a big endeavor and
related publications quite sparse.
The purpose of this trends and survey article is twofold. We first identify
and shed light on what we believe are the most pressing challenges MRS research
is facing, from both academic and industry perspectives. We review the state of
the art towards solving these challenges and discuss its limitations. Second,
we detail possible future directions and visions we contemplate for the further
evolution of the field. The article should therefore serve two purposes: giving
the interested reader an overview of current challenges in MRS research and
providing guidance for young researchers by identifying interesting, yet
under-researched, directions in the field
Music Recommendation Using Audio Features
Report published in the Proceedings of the National Conference on "Education and Research in the Information Society", Plovdiv, June, 2017The paper presents a research that aims to investigate whether sound features can
be used for recommending music. First it presents a study of existing tools for sound processing
in order to see what features of the sound can be extracted with these tools. Second it presents
experiments that use machine learning algorithms to identify the key features of the sound for
the purpose of recommending music. Finally, manually classified data from 19 users were used
for experiments. The achieved maximum average accuracy was measured to be 68.16%. This
is an 18.17% increase in accuracy over the baseline. The conclusion is that it makes sense to
analyze sound for the purpose of recommending music.Association for the Development of the Information Society, Institute of Mathematics and Informatics Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Plovdiv University "Paisii Hilendarski
A comparative analysis of recommender systems based on item aspect opinions extracted from user reviews
In popular applications such as e-commerce sites and social media, users
provide online reviews giving personal opinions about a wide array of items, such
as products, services and people. These reviews are usually in the form of free text,
and represent a rich source of information about the users’ preferences. Among the
information elements that can be extracted from reviews, opinions about particular
item aspects (i.e., characteristics, attributes or components) have been shown to be
effective for user modeling and personalized recommendation. In this paper, we investigate
the aspect-based recommendation problem by separately addressing three
tasks, namely identifying references to item aspects in user reviews, classifying the
sentiment orientation of the opinions about such aspects in the reviews, and exploiting
the extracted aspect opinion information to provide enhanced recommendations. Differently
to previous work, we integrate and empirically evaluate several state-of-the-art
and novel methods for each of the above tasks. We conduct extensive experiments
on standard datasets and several domains, analyzing distinct recommendation quality
metrics and characteristics of the datasets, domains and extracted aspects. As a result
of our investigation, we not only derive conclusions about which combination of methods
is most appropriate according to the above issues, but also provide a number of
valuable resources for opinion mining and recommendation purposes, such as domain
aspect vocabularies and domain-dependent, aspect-level lexiconsThis work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness
(TIN2016-80630-P)
Text-based Sentiment Analysis and Music Emotion Recognition
Nowadays, with the expansion of social media, large amounts of user-generated
texts like tweets, blog posts or product reviews are shared online. Sentiment polarity
analysis of such texts has become highly attractive and is utilized in recommender
systems, market predictions, business intelligence and more. We also witness deep
learning techniques becoming top performers on those types of tasks. There are
however several problems that need to be solved for efficient use of deep neural
networks on text mining and text polarity analysis.
First of all, deep neural networks are data hungry. They need to be fed with
datasets that are big in size, cleaned and preprocessed as well as properly labeled.
Second, the modern natural language processing concept of word embeddings as a
dense and distributed text feature representation solves sparsity and dimensionality
problems of the traditional bag-of-words model. Still, there are various uncertainties
regarding the use of word vectors: should they be generated from the same dataset
that is used to train the model or it is better to source them from big and popular
collections that work as generic text feature representations? Third, it is not easy for
practitioners to find a simple and highly effective deep learning setup for various
document lengths and types. Recurrent neural networks are weak with longer texts
and optimal convolution-pooling combinations are not easily conceived. It is thus
convenient to have generic neural network architectures that are effective and can
adapt to various texts, encapsulating much of design complexity.
This thesis addresses the above problems to provide methodological and practical
insights for utilizing neural networks on sentiment analysis of texts and achieving
state of the art results. Regarding the first problem, the effectiveness of various
crowdsourcing alternatives is explored and two medium-sized and emotion-labeled
song datasets are created utilizing social tags. One of the research interests of Telecom
Italia was the exploration of relations between music emotional stimulation and
driving style. Consequently, a context-aware music recommender system that aims
to enhance driving comfort and safety was also designed. To address the second
problem, a series of experiments with large text collections of various contents and
domains were conducted. Word embeddings of different parameters were exercised
and results revealed that their quality is influenced (mostly but not only) by the
size of texts they were created from. When working with small text datasets, it is
thus important to source word features from popular and generic word embedding
collections. Regarding the third problem, a series of experiments involving convolutional
and max-pooling neural layers were conducted. Various patterns relating
text properties and network parameters with optimal classification accuracy were
observed. Combining convolutions of words, bigrams, and trigrams with regional
max-pooling layers in a couple of stacks produced the best results. The derived
architecture achieves competitive performance on sentiment polarity analysis of
movie, business and product reviews.
Given that labeled data are becoming the bottleneck of the current deep learning
systems, a future research direction could be the exploration of various data programming
possibilities for constructing even bigger labeled datasets. Investigation
of feature-level or decision-level ensemble techniques in the context of deep neural
networks could also be fruitful. Different feature types do usually represent complementary
characteristics of data. Combining word embedding and traditional text
features or utilizing recurrent networks on document splits and then aggregating the
predictions could further increase prediction accuracy of such models
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