Current Challenges and Visions in Music Recommender Systems Research

Music recommender systems (MRS) have experienced a boom in recent years, thanks to the emergence and success of online streaming services, which nowadays make available almost all music in the world at the user's fingertip. While today's MRS considerably help users to find interesting music in these huge catalogs, MRS research is still facing substantial challenges. In particular when it comes to build, incorporate, and evaluate recommendation strategies that integrate information beyond simple user--item interactions or content-based descriptors, but dig deep into the very essence of listener needs, preferences, and intentions, MRS research becomes a big endeavor and related publications quite sparse. The purpose of this trends and survey article is twofold. We first identify and shed light on what we believe are the most pressing challenges MRS research is facing, from both academic and industry perspectives. We review the state of the art towards solving these challenges and discuss its limitations. Second, we detail possible future directions and visions we contemplate for the further evolution of the field. The article should therefore serve two purposes: giving the interested reader an overview of current challenges in MRS research and providing guidance for young researchers by identifying interesting, yet under-researched, directions in the field

Hierarchical Attention Network for Visually-aware Food Recommendation

Food recommender systems play an important role in assisting users to identify the desired food to eat. Deciding what food to eat is a complex and multi-faceted process, which is influenced by many factors such as the ingredients, appearance of the recipe, the user's personal preference on food, and various contexts like what had been eaten in the past meals. In this work, we formulate the food recommendation problem as predicting user preference on recipes based on three key factors that determine a user's choice on food, namely, 1) the user's (and other users') history; 2) the ingredients of a recipe; and 3) the descriptive image of a recipe. To address this challenging problem, we develop a dedicated neural network based solution Hierarchical Attention based Food Recommendation (HAFR) which is capable of: 1) capturing the collaborative filtering effect like what similar users tend to eat; 2) inferring a user's preference at the ingredient level; and 3) learning user preference from the recipe's visual images. To evaluate our proposed method, we construct a large-scale dataset consisting of millions of ratings from AllRecipes.com. Extensive experiments show that our method outperforms several competing recommender solutions like Factorization Machine and Visual Bayesian Personalized Ranking with an average improvement of 12%, offering promising results in predicting user preference for food. Codes and dataset will be released upon acceptance

Formalizing Multimedia Recommendation through Multimodal Deep Learning

Recommender systems (RSs) offer personalized navigation experiences on online platforms, but recommendation remains a challenging task, particularly in specific scenarios and domains. Multimodality can help tap into richer information sources and construct more refined user/item profiles for recommendations. However, existing literature lacks a shared and universal schema for modeling and solving the recommendation problem through the lens of multimodality. This work aims to formalize a general multimodal schema for multimedia recommendation. It provides a comprehensive literature review of multimodal approaches for multimedia recommendation from the last eight years, outlines the theoretical foundations of a multimodal pipeline, and demonstrates its rationale by applying it to selected state-of-the-art approaches. The work also conducts a benchmarking analysis of recent algorithms for multimedia recommendation within Elliot, a rigorous framework for evaluating recommender systems. The main aim is to provide guidelines for designing and implementing the next generation of multimodal approaches in multimedia recommendation

Peeking into the other half of the glass : handling polarization in recommender systems.

This dissertation is about filtering and discovering information online while using recommender systems. In the first part of our research, we study the phenomenon of polarization and its impact on filtering and discovering information. Polarization is a social phenomenon, with serious consequences, in real-life, particularly on social media. Thus it is important to understand how machine learning algorithms, especially recommender systems, behave in polarized environments. We study polarization within the context of the users\u27 interactions with a space of items and how this affects recommender systems. We first formalize the concept of polarization based on item ratings and then relate it to the item reviews, when available. We then propose a domain independent data science pipeline to automatically detect polarization using the ratings rather than the properties, typically used to detect polarization, such as item\u27s content or social network topology. We perform an extensive comparison of polarization measures on several benchmark data sets and show that our polarization detection framework can detect different degrees of polarization and outperforms existing measures in capturing an intuitive notion of polarization. We also investigate and uncover certain peculiar patterns that are characteristic of environments where polarization emerges: A machine learning algorithm finds it easier to learn discriminating models in polarized environments: The models will quickly learn to keep each user in the safety of their preferred viewpoint, essentially, giving rise to filter bubbles and making them easier to learn. After quantifying the extent of polarization in current recommender system benchmark data, we propose new counter-polarization approaches for existing collaborative filtering recommender systems, focusing particularly on the state of the art models based on Matrix Factorization. Our work represents an essential step toward the new research area concerned with quantifying, detecting and counteracting polarization in human-generated data and machine learning algorithms.We also make a theoretical analysis of how polarization affects learning latent factor models, and how counter-polarization affects these models. In the second part of our dissertation, we investigate the problem of discovering related information by recommendation of tags on social media micro-blogging platforms. Real-time micro-blogging services such as Twitter have recently witnessed exponential growth, with millions of active web users who generate billions of micro-posts to share information, opinions and personal viewpoints, daily. However, these posts are inherently noisy and unstructured because they could be in any format, hence making them difficult to organize for the purpose of retrieval of relevant information. One way to solve this problem is using hashtags, which are quickly becoming the standard approach for annotation of various information on social media, such that varied posts about the same or related topic are annotated with the same hashtag. However hashtags are not used in a consistent manner and most importantly, are completely optional to use. This makes them unreliable as the sole mechanism for searching for relevant information. We investigate mechanisms for consolidating the hashtag space using recommender systems. Our methods are general enough that they can be used for hashtag annotation in various social media services such as twitter, as well as for general item recommendations on systems that rely on implicit user interest data such as e-learning and news sites, or explicit user ratings, such as e-commerce and online entertainment sites. To conclude, we propose a methodology to extract stories based on two types of hashtag co-occurrence graphs. Our research in hashtag recommendation was able to exploit the textual content that is available as part of user messages or posts, and thus resulted in hybrid recommendation strategies. Using content within this context can bridge polarization boundaries. However, when content is not available, is missing, or is unreliable, as in the case of platforms that are rich in multimedia and multilingual posts, the content option becomes less powerful and pure collaborative filtering regains its important role, along with the challenges of polarization