Personalised Visual Art Recommendation by Learning Latent Semantic Representations

In Recommender systems, data representation techniques play a great role as they have the power to entangle, hide and reveal explanatory factors embedded within datasets. Hence, they influence the quality of recommendations. Specifically, in Visual Art (VA) recommendations the complexity of the concepts embodied within paintings, makes the task of capturing semantics by machines far from trivial. In VA recommendation, prominent works commonly use manually curated metadata to drive recommendations. Recent works in this domain aim at leveraging visual features extracted using Deep Neural Networks (DNN). However, such data representation approaches are resource demanding and do not have a direct interpretation, hindering user acceptance. To address these limitations, we introduce an approach for Personalised Recommendation of Visual arts based on learning latent semantic representation of paintings. Specifically, we trained a Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) model on textual descriptions of paintings. Our LDA model manages to successfully uncover non-obvious semantic relationships between paintings whilst being able to offer explainable recommendations. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that our method tends to perform better than exploiting visual features extracted using pre-trained Deep Neural Networks.Comment: Accepted at SMAP202

Relation Embedding for Personalised POI Recommendation

Point-of-Interest (POI) recommendation is one of the most important location-based services helping people discover interesting venues or services. However, the extreme user-POI matrix sparsity and the varying spatio-temporal context pose challenges for POI systems, which affects the quality of POI recommendations. To this end, we propose a translation-based relation embedding for POI recommendation. Our approach encodes the temporal and geographic information, as well as semantic contents effectively in a low-dimensional relation space by using Knowledge Graph Embedding techniques. To further alleviate the issue of user-POI matrix sparsity, a combined matrix factorization framework is built on a user-POI graph to enhance the inference of dynamic personal interests by exploiting the side-information. Experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed model.Comment: 12 pages, 3 figures, Accepted in the 24th Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (PAKDD 2020

Together Yet Apart: Multimodal Representation Learning for Personalised Visual Art Recommendation

With the advent of digital media, the availability of art content has greatly expanded, making it increasingly challenging for individuals to discover and curate works that align with their personal preferences and taste. The task of providing accurate and personalised Visual Art (VA) recommendations is thus a complex one, requiring a deep understanding of the intricate interplay of multiple modalities such as images, textual descriptions, or other metadata. In this paper, we study the nuances of modalities involved in the VA domain (image and text) and how they can be effectively harnessed to provide a truly personalised art experience to users. Particularly, we develop four fusion-based multimodal VA recommendation pipelines and conduct a large-scale user-centric evaluation. Our results indicate that early fusion (i.e, joint multimodal learning of visual and textual features) is preferred over a late fusion of ranked paintings from unimodal models (state-of-the-art baselines) but only if the latent representation space of the multimodal painting embeddings is entangled. Our findings open a new perspective for a better representation learning in the VA RecSys domain

Computational Intelligence for the Micro Learning

The developments of the Web technology and the mobile devices have blurred the time and space boundaries of people’s daily activities, which enable people to work, entertain, and learn through the mobile device at almost anytime and anywhere. Together with the life-long learning requirement, such technology developments give birth to a new learning style, micro learning. Micro learning aims to effectively utilise learners’ fragmented spare time and carry out personalised learning activities. However, the massive volume of users and the online learning resources force the micro learning system deployed in the context of enormous and ubiquitous data. Hence, manually managing the online resources or user information by traditional methods are no longer feasible. How to utilise computational intelligence based solutions to automatically managing and process different types of massive information is the biggest research challenge for realising the micro learning service. As a result, to facilitate the micro learning service in the big data era efficiently, we need an intelligent system to manage the online learning resources and carry out different analysis tasks. To this end, an intelligent micro learning system is designed in this thesis. The design of this system is based on the service logic of the micro learning service. The micro learning system consists of three intelligent modules: learning material pre-processing module, learning resource delivery module and the intelligent assistant module. The pre-processing module interprets the content of the raw online learning resources and extracts key information from each resource. The pre-processing step makes the online resources ready to be used by other intelligent components of the system. The learning resources delivery module aims to recommend personalised learning resources to the target user base on his/her implicit and explicit user profiles. The goal of the intelligent assistant module is to provide some evaluation or assessment services (such as student dropout rate prediction and final grade prediction) to the educational resource providers or instructors. The educational resource providers can further refine or modify the learning materials based on these assessment results

Enhancing Personalised Recommendations with the Use of Multimodal Information

Whenever we watch a TV show or movie, we process a substantial amount of information that is conveyed to us via various multimedia mediums, in particular: visual, textual, and audio. These data signify distinctive properties that aid in creating a unique motion picture experience. In effort to not only produce a more personalised recommender system, but also tackle the problem of popularity bias, we develop a system that incorporates the use of multimodal information. Specifically, we investigate the correlation between features that are extracted using state of the art techniques and deep learning models from visual characteristics, audio patterns and subtitles. The framework is evaluated on a dataset comprising of 145 BBC TV programmes against genre and user baselines. We demonstrate that personalised recommendations can not only be improved with the use of multimodal information, but also outperform genre and user-based models in terms of diversity, whilst maintaining matching levels of accuracy