Mining product adopter information from online reviews for improving product recommendation

We present in this article an automated framework that extracts product adopter information from online reviews and incorporates the extracted information into feature-based matrix factorization formore effective product recommendation. In specific, we propose a bootstrapping approach for the extraction of product adopters from review text and categorize them into a number of different demographic categories. The aggregated demographic information of many product adopters can be used to characterize both products and users in the form of distributions over different demographic categories. We further propose a graphbased method to iteratively update user- and product-related distributions more reliably in a heterogeneous user-product graph and incorporate them as features into the matrix factorization approach for product recommendation. Our experimental results on a large dataset crawled from JINGDONG, the largest B2C e-commerce website in China, show that our proposed framework outperforms a number of competitive baselines for product recommendation

Knowledge-aware Complementary Product Representation Learning

Learning product representations that reflect complementary relationship plays a central role in e-commerce recommender system. In the absence of the product relationships graph, which existing methods rely on, there is a need to detect the complementary relationships directly from noisy and sparse customer purchase activities. Furthermore, unlike simple relationships such as similarity, complementariness is asymmetric and non-transitive. Standard usage of representation learning emphasizes on only one set of embedding, which is problematic for modelling such properties of complementariness. We propose using knowledge-aware learning with dual product embedding to solve the above challenges. We encode contextual knowledge into product representation by multi-task learning, to alleviate the sparsity issue. By explicitly modelling with user bias terms, we separate the noise of customer-specific preferences from the complementariness. Furthermore, we adopt the dual embedding framework to capture the intrinsic properties of complementariness and provide geometric interpretation motivated by the classic separating hyperplane theory. Finally, we propose a Bayesian network structure that unifies all the components, which also concludes several popular models as special cases. The proposed method compares favourably to state-of-art methods, in downstream classification and recommendation tasks. We also develop an implementation that scales efficiently to a dataset with millions of items and customers

Recommender systems in industrial contexts

This thesis consists of four parts: - An analysis of the core functions and the prerequisites for recommender systems in an industrial context: we identify four core functions for recommendation systems: Help do Decide, Help to Compare, Help to Explore, Help to Discover. The implementation of these functions has implications for the choices at the heart of algorithmic recommender systems. - A state of the art, which deals with the main techniques used in automated recommendation system: the two most commonly used algorithmic methods, the K-Nearest-Neighbor methods (KNN) and the fast factorization methods are detailed. The state of the art presents also purely content-based methods, hybridization techniques, and the classical performance metrics used to evaluate the recommender systems. This state of the art then gives an overview of several systems, both from academia and industry (Amazon, Google ...). - An analysis of the performances and implications of a recommendation system developed during this thesis: this system, Reperio, is a hybrid recommender engine using KNN methods. We study the performance of the KNN methods, including the impact of similarity functions used. Then we study the performance of the KNN method in critical uses cases in cold start situation. - A methodology for analyzing the performance of recommender systems in industrial context: this methodology assesses the added value of algorithmic strategies and recommendation systems according to its core functions.Comment: version 3.30, May 201

Accurate and justifiable : new algorithms for explainable recommendations.

Websites and online services thrive with large amounts of online information, products, and choices, that are available but exceedingly difficult to find and discover. This has prompted two major paradigms to help sift through information: information retrieval and recommender systems. The broad family of information retrieval techniques has given rise to the modern search engines which return relevant results, following a user\u27s explicit query. The broad family of recommender systems, on the other hand, works in a more subtle manner, and do not require an explicit query to provide relevant results. Collaborative Filtering (CF) recommender systems are based on algorithms that provide suggestions to users, based on what they like and what other similar users like. Their strength lies in their ability to make serendipitous, social recommendations about what books to read, songs to listen to, movies to watch, courses to take, or generally any type of item to consume. Their strength is also that they can recommend items of any type or content because their focus is on modeling the preferences of the users rather than the content of the recommended items. Although recommender systems have made great strides over the last two decades, with significant algorithmic advances that have made them increasingly accurate in their predictions, they suffer from a few notorious weaknesses. These include the cold-start problem when new items or new users enter the system, and lack of interpretability and explainability in the case of powerful black-box predictors, such as the Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) family of recommenders, including, in particular, the popular Matrix Factorization (MF) techniques. Also, the absence of any explanations to justify their predictions can reduce the transparency of recommender systems and thus adversely impact the user\u27s trust in them. In this work, we propose machine learning approaches for multi-domain Matrix Factorization (MF) recommender systems that can overcome the new user cold-start problem. We also propose new algorithms to generate explainable recommendations, using two state of the art models: Matrix Factorization (MF) and Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBM). Our experiments, which were based on rigorous cross-validation on the MovieLens benchmark data set and on real user tests, confirmed that our proposed methods succeed in generating explainable recommendations without a major sacrifice in accuracy