Improving the quality of the personalized electronic program guide

As Digital TV subscribers are offered more and more channels, it is becoming increasingly difficult for them to locate the right programme information at the right time. The personalized Electronic Programme Guide (pEPG) is one solution to this problem; it leverages artificial intelligence and user profiling techniques to learn about the viewing preferences of individual users in order to compile personalized viewing guides that fit their individual preferences. Very often the limited availability of profiling information is a key limiting factor in such personalized recommender systems. For example, it is well known that collaborative filtering approaches suffer significantly from the sparsity problem, which exists because the expected item-overlap between profiles is usually very low. In this article we address the sparsity problem in the Digital TV domain. We propose the use of data mining techniques as a way of supplementing meagre ratings-based profile knowledge with additional item-similarity knowledge that can be automatically discovered by mining user profiles. We argue that this new similarity knowledge can significantly enhance the performance of a recommender system in even the sparsest of profile spaces. Moreover, we provide an extensive evaluation of our approach using two large-scale, state-of-the-art online systems—PTVPlus, a personalized TV listings portal and Físchlár, an online digital video library system

Multi-modal Embedding Fusion-based Recommender

Recommendation systems have lately been popularized globally, with primary use cases in online interaction systems, with significant focus on e-commerce platforms. We have developed a machine learning-based recommendation platform, which can be easily applied to almost any items and/or actions domain. Contrary to existing recommendation systems, our platform supports multiple types of interaction data with multiple modalities of metadata natively. This is achieved through multi-modal fusion of various data representations. We deployed the platform into multiple e-commerce stores of different kinds, e.g. food and beverages, shoes, fashion items, telecom operators. Here, we present our system, its flexibility and performance. We also show benchmark results on open datasets, that significantly outperform state-of-the-art prior work.Comment: 7 pages, 8 figure

TransNets: Learning to Transform for Recommendation

Recently, deep learning methods have been shown to improve the performance of recommender systems over traditional methods, especially when review text is available. For example, a recent model, DeepCoNN, uses neural nets to learn one latent representation for the text of all reviews written by a target user, and a second latent representation for the text of all reviews for a target item, and then combines these latent representations to obtain state-of-the-art performance on recommendation tasks. We show that (unsurprisingly) much of the predictive value of review text comes from reviews of the target user for the target item. We then introduce a way in which this information can be used in recommendation, even when the target user's review for the target item is not available. Our model, called TransNets, extends the DeepCoNN model by introducing an additional latent layer representing the target user-target item pair. We then regularize this layer, at training time, to be similar to another latent representation of the target user's review of the target item. We show that TransNets and extensions of it improve substantially over the previous state-of-the-art.Comment: Accepted for publication in the 11th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys 2017

Addressing Item-Cold Start Problem in Recommendation Systems using Model Based Approach and Deep Learning

Traditional recommendation systems rely on past usage data in order to generate new recommendations. Those approaches fail to generate sensible recommendations for new users and items into the system due to missing information about their past interactions. In this paper, we propose a solution for successfully addressing item-cold start problem which uses model-based approach and recent advances in deep learning. In particular, we use latent factor model for recommendation, and predict the latent factors from item's descriptions using convolutional neural network when they cannot be obtained from usage data. Latent factors obtained by applying matrix factorization to the available usage data are used as ground truth to train the convolutional neural network. To create latent factor representations for the new items, the convolutional neural network uses their textual description. The results from the experiments reveal that the proposed approach significantly outperforms several baseline estimators

A Hybrid Web Recommendation System based on the Improved Association Rule Mining Algorithm

As the growing interest of web recommendation systems those are applied to deliver customized data for their users, we started working on this system. Generally the recommendation systems are divided into two major categories such as collaborative recommendation system and content based recommendation system. In case of collaborative recommen-dation systems, these try to seek out users who share same tastes that of given user as well as recommends the websites according to the liking given user. Whereas the content based recommendation systems tries to recommend web sites similar to those web sites the user has liked. In the recent research we found that the efficient technique based on asso-ciation rule mining algorithm is proposed in order to solve the problem of web page recommendation. Major problem of the same is that the web pages are given equal importance. Here the importance of pages changes according to the fre-quency of visiting the web page as well as amount of time user spends on that page. Also recommendation of newly added web pages or the pages those are not yet visited by users are not included in the recommendation set. To over-come this problem, we have used the web usage log in the adaptive association rule based web mining where the asso-ciation rules were applied to personalization. This algorithm was purely based on the Apriori data mining algorithm in order to generate the association rules. However this method also suffers from some unavoidable drawbacks. In this paper we are presenting and investigating the new approach based on weighted Association Rule Mining Algorithm and text mining. This is improved algorithm which adds semantic knowledge to the results, has more efficiency and hence gives better quality and performances as compared to existing approaches.Comment: 9 pages, 7 figures, 2 table

Automatic subscriptions in publish-subscribe systems

In this paper, we describe how to automate the process of subscribing to complex publish-subscribe systems. We present a proof-of-concept prototype, in which we analyze Web browsing history to generate zero-click subscriptions to Web feeds and video news stories. Our experience so far indicates that user attention data is a promising source of data for automating the subscription process