On content-based recommendation and user privacy in social-tagging systems

Recommendation systems and content filtering approaches based on annotations and ratings, essentially rely on users expressing their preferences and interests through their actions, in order to provide personalised content. This activity, in which users engage collectively has been named social tagging, and it is one of the most popular in which users engage online, and although it has opened new possibilities for application interoperability on the semantic web, it is also posing new privacy threats. It, in fact, consists of describing online or offline resources by using free-text labels (i.e. tags), therefore exposing the user profile and activity to privacy attacks. Users, as a result, may wish to adopt a privacy-enhancing strategy in order not to reveal their interests completely. Tag forgery is a privacy enhancing technology consisting of generating tags for categories or resources that do not reflect the user's actual preferences. By modifying their profile, tag forgery may have a negative impact on the quality of the recommendation system, thus protecting user privacy to a certain extent but at the expenses of utility loss. The impact of tag forgery on content-based recommendation is, therefore, investigated in a real-world application scenario where different forgery strategies are evaluated, and the consequent loss in utility is measured and compared.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author’s final draft

Survey of Personalized Learning Software Systems: A Taxonomy of Environments, Learning Content, and User Models

This paper presents a comprehensive systematic review of personalized learning software systems. All the systems under review are designed to aid educational stakeholders by personalizing one or more facets of the learning process. This is achieved by exploring and analyzing the common architectural attributes among personalized learning software systems. A literature-driven taxonomy is recognized and built to categorize and analyze the reviewed literature. Relevant papers are filtered to produce a final set of full systems to be reviewed and analyzed. In this meta-review, a set of 72 selected personalized learning software systems have been reviewed and categorized based on the proposed personalized learning taxonomy. The proposed taxonomy outlines the three main architectural components of any personalized learning software system: learning environment, learner model, and content. It further defines the different realizations and attributions of each component. Surveyed systems have been analyzed under the proposed taxonomy according to their architectural components, usage, strengths, and weaknesses. Then, the role of these systems in the development of the field of personalized learning systems is discussed. This review sheds light on the field’s current challenges that need to be resolved in the upcoming years

Enriching ontological user profiles with tagging history for multi-domain recommendations

Many advanced recommendation frameworks employ ontologies of various complexities to model individuals and items, providing a mechanism for the expression of user interests and the representation of item attributes. As a result, complex matching techniques can be applied to support individuals in the discovery of items according to explicit and implicit user preferences. Recently, the rapid adoption of Web2.0, and the proliferation of social networking sites, has resulted in more and more users providing an increasing amount of information about themselves that could be exploited for recommendation purposes. However, the unification of personal information with ontologies using the contemporary knowledge representation methods often associated with Web2.0 applications, such as community tagging, is a non-trivial task. In this paper, we propose a method for the unification of tags with ontologies by grounding tags to a shared representation in the form of Wordnet and Wikipedia. We incorporate individuals' tagging history into their ontological profiles by matching tags with ontology concepts. This approach is preliminary evaluated by extending an existing news recommendation system with user tagging histories harvested from popular social networking sites

Social and Semantic Contexts in Tourist Mobile Applications

The ongoing growth of the World Wide Web along with the increase possibility of access information through a variety of devices in mobility, has defi nitely changed the way users acquire, create, and personalize information, pushing innovative strategies for annotating and organizing it. In this scenario, Social Annotation Systems have quickly gained a huge popularity, introducing millions of metadata on di fferent Web resources following a bottom-up approach, generating free and democratic mechanisms of classi cation, namely folksonomies. Moving away from hierarchical classi cation schemas, folksonomies represent also a meaningful mean for identifying similarities among users, resources and tags. At any rate, they suff er from several limitations, such as the lack of specialized tools devoted to manage, modify, customize and visualize them as well as the lack of an explicit semantic, making di fficult for users to bene fit from them eff ectively. Despite appealing promises of Semantic Web technologies, which were intended to explicitly formalize the knowledge within a particular domain in a top-down manner, in order to perform intelligent integration and reasoning on it, they are still far from reach their objectives, due to di fficulties in knowledge acquisition and annotation bottleneck. The main contribution of this dissertation consists in modeling a novel conceptual framework that exploits both social and semantic contextual dimensions, focusing on the domain of tourism and cultural heritage. The primary aim of our assessment is to evaluate the overall user satisfaction and the perceived quality in use thanks to two concrete case studies. Firstly, we concentrate our attention on contextual information and navigation, and on authoring tool; secondly, we provide a semantic mapping of tags of the system folksonomy, contrasted and compared to the expert users' classi cation, allowing a bridge between social and semantic knowledge according to its constantly mutual growth. The performed user evaluations analyses results are promising, reporting a high level of agreement on the perceived quality in use of both the applications and of the speci c analyzed features, demonstrating that a social-semantic contextual model improves the general users' satisfactio

Lightweight Tag-Aware Personalized Recommendation on the Social Web Using Ontological Similarity

With the rapid growth of social tagging systems, many research efforts are being put intopersonalized search and recommendation using social tags (i.e., folksonomies). As users can freely choosetheir own vocabulary, social tags can be very ambiguous (for instance, due to the use of homonymsor synonyms). Machine learning techniques (such as clustering and deep neural networks) are usuallyapplied to overcome this tag ambiguity problem. However, the machine-learning-based solutions alwaysneed very powerful computing facilities to train recommendation models from a large amount of data,so they are inappropriate to be used in lightweight recommender systems. In this work, we propose anontological similarity to tackle the tag ambiguity problem without the need of model training by usingcontextual information. The novelty of this ontological similarity is that it first leverages external domainontologies to disambiguate tag information, and then semantically quantifies the relevance between userand item profiles according to the semantic similarity of the matching concepts of tags in the respectiveprofiles. Our experiments show that the proposed ontological similarity is semantically more accurate thanthe state-of-the-art similarity metrics, and can thus be applied to improve the performance of content-based tag-aware personalized recommendation on the Social Web. Consequently, as a model-training-freesolution, ontological similarity is a good disambiguation choice for lightweight recommender systems anda complement to machine-learning-based recommendation solutions.Fil: Xu, Zhenghua. University of Oxford; Reino UnidoFil: Tifrea-Marciuska, Oana. Bloomberg; Reino UnidoFil: Lukasiewicz, Thomas. University of Oxford; Reino UnidoFil: Martinez, Maria Vanina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Bahía Blanca. Instituto de Ciencias e Ingeniería de la Computación. Universidad Nacional del Sur. Departamento de Ciencias e Ingeniería de la Computación. Instituto de Ciencias e Ingeniería de la Computación; ArgentinaFil: Simari, Gerardo. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Bahía Blanca. Instituto de Ciencias e Ingeniería de la Computación. Universidad Nacional del Sur. Departamento de Ciencias e Ingeniería de la Computación. Instituto de Ciencias e Ingeniería de la Computación; ArgentinaFil: Chen, Cheng. China Academy of Electronics and Information Technology; Chin

개인화 검색 및 파트너쉽 선정을 위한 사용자 프로파일링

학위논문 (박사)-- 서울대학교 대학원 : 치의과학과, 2014. 2. 김홍기.The secret of change is to focus all of your energy not on fighting the old, but on building the new. - Socrates The automatic identification of user intention is an important but highly challenging research problem whose solution can greatly benefit information systems. In this thesis, I look at the problem of identifying sources of user interests, extracting latent semantics from it, and modelling it as a user profile. I present algorithms that automatically infer user interests and extract hidden semantics from it, specifically aimed at improving personalized search. I also present a methodology to model user profile as a buyer profile or a seller profile, where the attributes of the profile are populated from a controlled vocabulary. The buyer profiles and seller profiles are used in partnership match. In the domain of personalized search, first, a novel method to construct a profile of user interests is proposed which is based on mining anchor text. Second, two methods are proposed to builder a user profile that gather terms from a folksonomy system where matrix factorization technique is explored to discover hidden relationship between them. The objective of the methods is to discover latent relationship between terms such that contextually, semantically, and syntactically related terms could be grouped together, thus disambiguating the context of term usage. The profile of user interests is also analysed to judge its clustering tendency and clustering accuracy. Extensive evaluation indicates that a profile of user interests, that can correctly or precisely disambiguate the context of user query, has a significant impact on the personalized search quality. In the domain of partnership match, an ontology termed as partnership ontology is proposed. The attributes or concepts, in the partnership ontology, are features representing context of work. It is used by users to lay down their requirements as buyer profiles or seller profiles. A semantic similarity measure is defined to compute a ranked list of matching seller profiles for a given buyer profile.1 Introduction 1 1.1 User Profiling for Personalized Search . . . . . . . . 9 1.1.1 Motivation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 1.1.2 Research Problems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 1.2 User Profiling for Partnership Match . . . . . . . . 18 1.2.1 Motivation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 1.2.2 Research Problems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 1.3 Contributions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25 1.4 System Architecture - Personalized Search . . . . . 29 1.5 System Architecture - Partnership Match . . . . . . 31 1.6 Organization of this Dissertation . . . . . . . . . . 32 2 Background 35 2.1 Introduction to Social Web . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 2.2 Matrix Decomposition Methods . . . . . . . . . . . 40 2.3 User Interest Profile For Personalized Web Search Non Folksonomy based . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 2.4 User Interest Profile for Personalized Web Search Folksonomy based . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45 2.5 Personalized Search . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47 2.6 Partnership Match . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52 3 Mining anchor text for building User Interest Profile: A non-folksonomy based personalized search 56 3.1 Exclusively Yours' . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59 3.1.1 Infer User Interests . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61 3.1.2 Weight Computation . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64 3.1.3 Query Expansion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67 3.2 Exclusively Yours' Algorithm . . . . . . . . . . . . 68 3.3 Experiments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71 3.3.1 DataSet . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72 3.3.2 Evaluation Metrics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73 3.3.3 User Profile Efficacy . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74 3.3.4 Personalized vs. Non-Personalized Results . 76 3.4 Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80 4 Matrix factorization for building Clustered User Interest Profile: A folksonomy based personalized search 82 4.1 Aggregating tags from user search history . . . . . 86 4.2 Latent Semantics in UIP . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90 4.2.1 Computing the tag-tag Similarity matrix . . 90 4.2.2 Tag Clustering to generate svdCUIP and modSvdCUIP 98 4.3 Personalized Search . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101 4.4 Experimental Evaluation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103 4.4.1 Data Set and Experiment Methodology . . . 103 4.4.1.1 Custom Data Set and Evaluation Metrics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103 4.4.1.2 AOL Query Data Set and Evaluation Metrics . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107 4.4.1.3 Experiment set up to estimate the value of k and d . . . . . . . . . . 107 4.4.1.4 Experiment set up to compare the proposed approaches with other approaches . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109 4.4.2 Experiment Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111 4.4.2.1 Clustering Tendency . . . . . . . . 111 4.4.2.2 Determining the value for dimension parameter, k, for the Custom Data Set . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113 4.4.2.3 Determining the value of distinctness parameter, d, for the Custom data set . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115 4.4.2.4 CUIP visualization . . . . . . . . . 117 4.4.2.5 Determining the value of the dimension reduction parameter k for the AOL data set. . . . . . . . . . . . 119 4.4.2.6 Determining the value of distinctness parameter, d, for the AOL data set . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120 4.4.2.7 Time to generate svdCUIP and modSvd-CUIP . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 122 4.4.2.8 Comparison of the svdCUIP, modSvd-CUIP, and tfIdfCUIP for different classes of queries . . . . . . . . . . 123 4.4.2.9 Comparing all five methods - Improvement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 124 4.4.3 Discussion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 126 5 User Profiling for Partnership Match 133 5.1 Supplier Selection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137 5.2 Criteria for Partnership Establishment . . . . . . . 140 5.3 Partnership Ontology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143 5.4 Case Study . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147 5.4.1 Buyer Profile and Seller Profile . . . . . . . 153 5.4.2 Semantic Similarity Measure . . . . . . . . . 155 5.5 Discussion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 160 5.6 Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 162 6 Conclusion 164 6.1 Future Work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167 6.1.1 Degree of Personalization . . . . . . . . . . . 167 6.1.2 Filter Bubble . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 168 6.1.3 IPR issues in Partnership Match . . . . . . . 169 Bibliography 170 Appendices 193 .1 Pairs of Query and target URL . . . . . . . . . . . 194 .2 Examples of Expanded Queries . . . . . . . . . . . 197 .3 An example of svdCUIP, modSvdCUIP, tfIdfCUIP 198Docto

MC2: MPEG-7 content modelling communities

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel UniversityThe use of multimedia content on the web has grown significantly in recent years. Websites such as Facebook, YouTube and Flickr cater for enormous amounts of multimedia content uploaded by users. This vast amount of multimedia content requires comprehensive content modelling otherwise retrieving relevant content will be challenging. Modelling multimedia content can be an extremely time consuming task that may seem impossible particularly when undertaken by individual users. However, the advent of Web 2.0 and associated communities, such as YouTube and Flickr, has shown that users appear to be more willing to collaborate in order to take on enormous tasks such as multimedia content modelling. Harnessing the power of communities to achieve comprehensive content modelling is the primary focus of this research. The aim of this thesis is to explore collaborative multimedia content modelling and in particular the effectiveness of existing multimedia content modelling tools, taking into account the key development challenges of existing collaborative content modelling research and the associated modelling tools. Four research objectives are pursued in order to achieve this; first, design a user experiment to study users’ tagging behaviour with existing multimedia tagging tools and identify any relationships between such user behaviour; second, design and develop a framework for MPEG-7 content modelling communities based on the results of the experiment; third, implement an online service as a proof of concept of the framework; fourth, validate the framework through the online service during a repeat of the initial user experiment. This research contributes first, a conceptual model of user behaviour visualised as a fuzzy cognitive map and, second, an MPEG-7 framework for multimedia content modelling communities (MC2) and its proof of concept as an online service. The fuzzy cognitive model embodies relationships between user tagging behaviour and context and provides an understanding of user priorities in the description of content features and the relationships that exist between them. The MC2 framework, developed based on the fuzzy cognitive model, is deep-rooted in user content modelling behaviour and content preferences. A proof of concept of the MC2 framework is implemented as an online service in which all metadata is modelled using MPEG-7. The online service is validated, first, empirically with the same group of users and through the same experiment that led to the development of the fuzzy cognitive model and, second, functionally against the folksonomy and MPEG-7 content modelling tools used in the initial experiment. The validation demonstrates that MC2 has the advantages without the shortcomings of existing multimedia tagging tools by harnessing the ease of use of folksonomy tools while producing comprehensive structured metadata.Supported by UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC

Building and exploiting context on the web

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Resources and users in the tagging process: approaches and case studies

In this contribution we propose a comparison between two distinct approaches to the annotation of digital resources. The former, top-down, is rooted in the cathedral model and is based on an authoritative, centralized definition of the adopted mark-up language; the latter, bottom-up, refers to the bazaar model and is based on the contributions of a community of users. These two approaches are analyzed taking into account both their descriptive potential and the constraints they impose on the reasoning process of recommender systems, with special reference to user profiling. Three case studies are described, with reference to research projects that apply these approaches in the contexts of e-learning and knowledge management

Personalized Recommender Systems for Resource-based Learning - Hybrid Graph-based Recommender Systems for Folksonomies

As the Web increasingly pervades our everyday lives, we are faced with an overload of information. We often learn on-the-job without a teacher and without didactically prepared learning resources. We not only learn on our own but also collaboratively on social platforms where we discuss issues, exchange information and share knowledge with others. We actively learn with resources we find on the Web such as videos, blogs, forums or wikis. This form of self-regulated learning is called resource-based learning. An ongoing challenge in technology enhanced learning (TEL) and in particular in resource-based learning, is supporting learners in finding learning resources relevant to their current needs and learning goals. In social tagging systems, users collaboratively attach keywords called tags to resources thereby forming a network-like structure called a folksonomy. Additional semantic information gained for example from activity hierarchies or semantic tags, form an extended folksonomy and provide valuable information about the context of the resources the learner has tagged, the related activities the resources could be relevant for, and the learning task the learner is currently working on. This additional semantic information could be exploited by recommender systems to generate personalized recommendations of learning resources. Thus, the first research goal of this thesis is to develop and evaluate personalized recommender algorithms for a resource-based learning scenario. To this end, the resource-based learning application scenario is analysed, taking an existing learning platform as a concrete example, in order to determine which additional semantic information could be exploited for the recommendation of learning resources. Several new hybrid graph-based recommender approaches are implemented and evaluated. Additional semantic information gained from activities, activity hierarchies, semantic tag types, the semantic relatedness between tags and the context-specific information found in a folksonomy are thereby exploited. The proposed recommender algorithms are evaluated in offline experiments on different datasets representing diverse evaluation scenarios. The evaluation results show that incorporating additional semantic information is advantageous for providing relevant recommendations. The second goal of this thesis is to investigate alternative evaluation approaches for recommender algorithms for resource-based learning. Offline experiments are fast to conduct and easy to repeat, however they face the so called incompleteness problem as datasets are limited to the historical interactions of the users. Thus newly recommended resources, in which the user had not shown an interest in the past, cannot be evaluated. The recommendation of novel and diverse learning resources is however a requirement for TEL and needs to be evaluated. User studies complement offline experiments as the users themselves judge the relevance or novelty of the recommendations. But user studies are expensive to conduct and it is often difficult to recruit a large number of participants. Therefore a gap exists between the fast, easy to repeat offline experiments and the more expensive user studies. Crowdsourcing is an alternative as it offers the advantages of offline experiments, whilst still retaining the advantages of a user-centric evaluation. In this thesis, a crowdsourcing evaluation approach for recommender algorithms for TEL is proposed and a repeated evaluation of one of the proposed recommender algorithms is conducted as a proof-of-concept. The results of both runs of the experiment show that crowdsourcing can be used as an alternative approach to evaluate graph-based recommender algorithms for TEL