Recommending Items in Social Tagging Systems Using Tag and Time Information

In this work we present a novel item recommendation approach that aims at improving Collaborative Filtering (CF) in social tagging systems using the information about tags and time. Our algorithm follows a two-step approach, where in the first step a potentially interesting candidate item-set is found using user-based CF and in the second step this candidate item-set is ranked using item-based CF. Within this ranking step we integrate the information of tag usage and time using the Base-Level Learning (BLL) equation coming from human memory theory that is used to determine the reuse-probability of words and tags using a power-law forgetting function. As the results of our extensive evaluation conducted on data-sets gathered from three social tagging systems (BibSonomy, CiteULike and MovieLens) show, the usage of tag-based and time information via the BLL equation also helps to improve the ranking and recommendation process of items and thus, can be used to realize an effective item recommender that outperforms two alternative algorithms which also exploit time and tag-based information.Comment: 6 pages, 2 tables, 9 figure

When users generate music playlists: When words leave off, music begins?

Music systems that generate playlists are gaining increasing popularity, yet ways to select songs to be acceptable to users is still elusive. We present the results of an explorative study that focused on the language of musically untrained end users for playlist choices, in a variety of listening contexts. Our results indicate that there are a number of opportunities for playlist recommendation or retrieval systems, particularly by taking context into account

Recommender Systems

The ongoing rapid expansion of the Internet greatly increases the necessity of effective recommender systems for filtering the abundant information. Extensive research for recommender systems is conducted by a broad range of communities including social and computer scientists, physicists, and interdisciplinary researchers. Despite substantial theoretical and practical achievements, unification and comparison of different approaches are lacking, which impedes further advances. In this article, we review recent developments in recommender systems and discuss the major challenges. We compare and evaluate available algorithms and examine their roles in the future developments. In addition to algorithms, physical aspects are described to illustrate macroscopic behavior of recommender systems. Potential impacts and future directions are discussed. We emphasize that recommendation has a great scientific depth and combines diverse research fields which makes it of interests for physicists as well as interdisciplinary researchers.Comment: 97 pages, 20 figures (To appear in Physics Reports

The Role of Cores in Recommender Benchmarking for Social Bookmarking Systems

Social bookmarking systems have established themselves as an important part in today’s Web. In such systems, tag recommender systems support users during the posting of a resource by suggesting suitable tags. Tag recommender algorithms have often been evaluated in offline benchmarking experiments. Yet, the particular setup of such experiments has rarely been analyzed. In particular, since the recommendation quality usually suffers from difficulties such as the sparsity of the data or the cold-start problem for new resources or users, datasets have often been pruned to so-called cores (specific subsets of the original datasets), without much consideration of the implications on the benchmarking results. In this article, we generalize the notion of a core by introducing the new notion of a set-core, which is independent of any graph structure, to overcome a structural drawback in the previous constructions of cores on tagging data. We show that problems caused by some types of cores can be eliminated using set-cores. Further, we present a thorough analysis of tag recommender benchmarking setups using cores. To that end, we conduct a large-scale experiment on four real-world datasets, in which we analyze the influence of different cores on the evaluation of recommendation algorithms. We can show that the results of the comparison of different recommendation approaches depends on the selection of core type and level. For the benchmarking of tag recommender algorithms, our results suggest that the evaluation must be set up more carefully and should not be based on one arbitrarily chosen core type and level