A Personalized Travel Recommendation System Using Social Media Analysis

Personalization of recommender systems enables customized services to users. Social media is one resource that aids personalization. This study explores the use of twitter data to personalize travel recommendations. A machine learning classification model is used to identify travel related tweets. The travel tweets are then used to personalize recommendations regarding places of interest for the user. Places of interest are categorized as: historical buildings, museums, parks, and restaurants. To better personalize the model, travel tweets of the user\u27s friends and followers are also mined. Volunteer twitter users were asked to provide their twitter handle as well as rank their travel category preferences in a survey. We evaluated our model by comparing the predictions made by our model with the users choices in the survey. The evaluations show 68% prediction accuracy. The accuracy can be improved with a better travel-tweet training dataset as well as a better travel category identification technique using machine learning. The travel categories can be increased to include items like sports venues, musical events, entertainment, etc. and thereby fine-tune the recommendations. The proposed model lists \u27n\u27 places of interest from each category in proportion to the travel category score generated by the model

A probabilistic model to resolve diversity-accuracy challenge of recommendation systems

Recommendation systems have wide-spread applications in both academia and industry. Traditionally, performance of recommendation systems has been measured by their precision. By introducing novelty and diversity as key qualities in recommender systems, recently increasing attention has been focused on this topic. Precision and novelty of recommendation are not in the same direction, and practical systems should make a trade-off between these two quantities. Thus, it is an important feature of a recommender system to make it possible to adjust diversity and accuracy of the recommendations by tuning the model. In this paper, we introduce a probabilistic structure to resolve the diversity-accuracy dilemma in recommender systems. We propose a hybrid model with adjustable level of diversity and precision such that one can perform this by tuning a single parameter. The proposed recommendation model consists of two models: one for maximization of the accuracy and the other one for specification of the recommendation list to tastes of users. Our experiments on two real datasets show the functionality of the model in resolving accuracy-diversity dilemma and outperformance of the model over other classic models. The proposed method could be extensively applied to real commercial systems due to its low computational complexity and significant performance.Comment: 19 pages, 5 figure

Recommending research colloquia: A study of several sources for user profiling

The study reported in this paper is an attempt to improve content-based recommendation in CoMeT, a social system for sharing information about research colloquia in Carnegie Mellon and University of Pittsburgh campuses. To improve the quality of recommendation in CoMeT, we explored three additional sources for building user profiles: tags used by users to annotate CoMeT's talks, partial content of CiteULike papers bookmarked by users, and tags used to annotate CiteULike papers. We also compare different tag integration models to study the impact of information fusion on recommendations outcome. The results demonstrate that information encapsulated in CiteULike bookmarks generally helps to improve several aspects of recommendation. The addition of tags by fusing them into keyword profiles helps to improve precision and novelty of recommendation, but may harm systems ability to recommend generally interesting talks. The effects of tags and bookmarks appeared to be stackable. © 2010 ACM

Challenges in context-aware mobile language learning: the MASELTOV approach

Smartphones, as highly portable networked computing devices with embedded sensors including GPS receivers, are ideal platforms to support context-aware language learning. They can enable learning when the user is en-gaged in everyday activities while out and about, complementing formal language classes. A significant challenge, however, has been the practical implementation of services that can accurately identify and make use of context, particularly location, to offer meaningful language learning recommendations to users. In this paper we review a range of approaches to identifying context to support mobile language learning. We consider how dynamically changing aspects of context may influence the quality of recommendations presented to a user. We introduce the MASELTOV project’s use of context awareness combined with a rules-based recommendation engine to present suitable learning content to recent immigrants in urban areas; a group that may benefit from contextual support and can use the city as a learning environment

Personalized Approaches to Supporting the Learning Needs of Lifelong Professional Learners

Advanced learning technology research has begun to take on a complex challenge: supporting lifelong learning. Professional learning is an essential subset of lifelong learning that is more tractable than the full lifelong learning challenge. Professionals do not always have access to professional teachers to provide input to the problems they encounter, so they rely on their peers in an online learning community (OLC) to help meet their learning needs. Supporting professional learners within an OLC is a difficult problem as the learning needs of each learner continuously evolve, often in different ways from other learners. Hence, there is a need to provide personalized support to learners adapted to their individual learning needs. This thesis explores personalized approaches for detecting the unperceived learning needs and meeting the expressed learning needs of learners in an OLC. The experimental test bed for this research is Stack Overflow (SO), an OLC used by software professionals. To date, seven experiments have been carried out mining SO peer-peer interaction data. Knowing that question-answerers play a huge role in meeting the learning needs of the question-askers, the first experiment aimed to detect the learning needs of the answerers. Results from experiment 1 show that reputable answerers themselves demonstrate unperceived learning needs as revealed by a decline in quality answers in SO. Of course, a decline in quality answers could impact the help-seeking experience of question-askers; hence experiment 2 sought to understand the effects of the help-seeking experience of question-askers on their enthusiasm to continuously participate within the OLC. As expected, negative help-seeking experiences of question-askers had a large impact on their propensity to seek further help within the OLC. To improve the help-seeking experience of question-askers, it is important to proactively detect the learning needs of the question-answerers before they provide poor quality answers. Thus, in experiment 3 the goal was to predict whether a question-answerer would give a poor answer to a question based on their past peer-peer interactions. Under various assumptions, accuracies ranging from 84.57% to 94.54% were achieved. Next, experiment 4 attempted to detect the unperceived learning needs of question-askers even before they are aware of such needs. Using information about a learner’s interactions over a 5-month period, a prediction was made as to what they would be asking about during the next month, achieving recall and precision values of 0.93 and 0.81. Knowing the learning needs of question-askers early creates an opportunity to predict prospective answerers who could provide timely and quality answers to their question. The goal of experiment 5 was thus to predict the actual answerers for questions based only on information known at the time the question was asked. The iv success rate was at best 63.15%, which would only be marginally useful to inform a real-life peer recommender system. Thus, experiment 6 explored new measures in predicting the answerers, boosting the success rate to 89.64%. Of course, a peer recommender system would be deemed to be especially useful if it can provide prompt interventions, especially to get answers to questions that would otherwise not be answered quickly. To this end, experiment 7 attempted to predict the question-askers whose questions would be answered late or even remain unanswered, and a success rate of 68.4% was achieved. Results from these experiments suggest that modelling the activities of learners in an OLC is key in providing support to them to meet their learning needs. Perhaps, the most important lesson learned in this research is that lightweight approaches can be developed to help meet the evolving learning needs of professionals, even as knowledge changes within a profession. Metrics based on the experiments above are exactly such lightweight methodologies and could be the basis for useful tools to support professional learners

Deep Learning based Recommender System: A Survey and New Perspectives

With the ever-growing volume of online information, recommender systems have been an effective strategy to overcome such information overload. The utility of recommender systems cannot be overstated, given its widespread adoption in many web applications, along with its potential impact to ameliorate many problems related to over-choice. In recent years, deep learning has garnered considerable interest in many research fields such as computer vision and natural language processing, owing not only to stellar performance but also the attractive property of learning feature representations from scratch. The influence of deep learning is also pervasive, recently demonstrating its effectiveness when applied to information retrieval and recommender systems research. Evidently, the field of deep learning in recommender system is flourishing. This article aims to provide a comprehensive review of recent research efforts on deep learning based recommender systems. More concretely, we provide and devise a taxonomy of deep learning based recommendation models, along with providing a comprehensive summary of the state-of-the-art. Finally, we expand on current trends and provide new perspectives pertaining to this new exciting development of the field.Comment: The paper has been accepted by ACM Computing Surveys. https://doi.acm.org/10.1145/328502