Probabilistic Personalized Recommendation Models For Heterogeneous Social Data

Content recommendation has risen to a new dimension with the advent of platforms like Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, Dailybooth, and Instagram. Although this uproar of data has provided us with a goldmine of real-world information, the problem of information overload has become a major barrier in developing predictive models. Therefore, the objective of this The- sis is to propose various recommendation, prediction and information retrieval models that are capable of leveraging such vast heterogeneous content. More specifically, this Thesis focuses on proposing models based on probabilistic generative frameworks for the following tasks: (a) recommending backers and projects in Kickstarter crowdfunding domain and (b) point of interest recommendation in Foursquare. Through comprehensive set of experiments over a variety of datasets, we show that our models are capable of providing practically useful results for recommendation and information retrieval tasks

Toward a Cognitive-Inspired Hashtag Recommendation for Twitter Data Analysis

This research investigates hashtag suggestions in a heterogeneous and huge social network, as well as a cognitive-based deep learning solution based on distributed knowledge graphs. Community detection is first performed to find the connected communities in a vast and heterogeneous social network. The knowledge graph is subsequently generated for each discovered community, with an emphasis on expressing the semantic relationships among the Twitter platform’s user communities. Each community is trained with the embedded deep learning model. To recommend hashtags for the new user in the social network, the correlation between the tweets of such user and the knowledge graph of each community is explored to set the relevant communities of such user. The models of the relevant communities are used to infer the hashtags of the tweets of such users. We conducted extensive testing to demonstrate the usefulness of our methods on a variety of tweet collections. Experimental results show that the proposed approach is more efficient than the baseline approaches in terms of both runtime and accuracy.acceptedVersio

Group Recommendations: Survey and Perspectives

The popularity of group recommender systems has increased in the last years. More and more social activity is generated by users over the Web and thus not only domains as TV, music or holidays are used and researched anymore for group recommendation, but also collaborative learning support, digital libraries and other domains seems to be promising for group recommendation. Moreover, principles of group recommenders can be used in order to overcome some single user recommendation shortcomings, such as cold start problem. Numerous group recommenders have been proposed, they differ in application domains which are specific in group characteristics. Today's group recommenders do not include and use the power of social aspects (group structure, social status etc.), which can be extracted and derived from the group. We provide a survey of group recommendation principles for the Web domain and discuss trends and perspectives in this field