Recommender system to support comprehensive exploration of large scale scientific datasets

Bases de dados de entidades científicas, como compostos químicos, doenças e objetos astronómicos, têm crescido em tamanho e complexidade, chegando a milhares de milhões de itens por base de dados. Os investigadores precisam de ferramentas novas e inovadoras para auxiliar na escolha desses itens. Este trabalho propõe o uso de Sistemas de Recomendação para auxiliar os investigadores a encontrar itens de interesse. Identificamos como um dos maiores desafios para a aplicação de sistemas de recomendação em áreas científicas a falta de conjuntos de dados padronizados e de acesso aberto com informações sobre as preferências dos utilizadores. Para superar esse desafio, desenvolvemos uma metodologia denominada LIBRETTI - Recomendação Baseada em Literatura de Itens Científicos, cujo objetivo é a criação de conjuntos de dados , relacionados com campos científicos. Estes conjuntos de dados são criados com base no principal recurso de conhecimento que a Ciência possui: a literatura científica. A metodologia LIBRETTI permitiu o desenvolvimento de novos algoritmos de recomendação específicos para vários campos científicos. Além do LIBRETTI, as principais contribuições desta tese são conjuntos de dados de recomendação padronizados nas áreas de Astronomia, Química e Saúde (relacionado com a doença COVID-19), um sistema de recomendação semântica híbrido para compostos químicos em conjuntos de dados de grande escala, uma abordagem híbrida baseada no enriquecimento sequencial (SeEn) para recomendações sequenciais, um pipeline baseado em semântica de vários campos para recomendar entidades biomédicas relacionadas com a doença COVID-19.Databases for scientific entities, such as chemical compounds, diseases and astronomical objects, are growing in size and complexity, reaching billions of items per database. Researchers need new and innovative tools for assisting the choice of these items. This work proposes the use of Recommender Systems approaches for helping researchers to find items of interest. We identified as one of the major challenges for applying RS in scientific fields the lack of standard and open-access datasets with information about the preferences of the users. To overcome this challenge, we developed a methodology called LIBRETTI - LIterature Based RecommEndaTion of scienTific Items, whose goal is to create datasets related to scientific fields. These datasets are created based on scientific literature, the major resource of knowledge that Science has. LIBRETTI methodology allowed the development and testing of new recommender algorithms specific for each field. Besides LIBRETTI, the main contributions of this thesis are standard and sequence-aware recommendation datasets in the fields of Astronomy, Chemistry, and Health (related to COVID-19 disease), a hybrid semantic recommender system for chemical compounds in large-scale datasets, a hybrid approach based on sequential enrichment (SeEn) for sequence-aware recommendations, a multi-field semantic-based pipeline for recommending biomedical entities related to COVID-19 disease

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